Alienware’s new gaming monitor is massive, curved, and has a generous 1440p resolution, but I don’t really care about any of that. What grabs my attention, and what should be why you might spend big bucks on this monitor, is the QD-OLED technology it uses.
I know, another damn acronym. This one, though, is easy to follow. The QD stands for Quantum Dot and the OLED is organic light-emitting diodes. You’ve probably heard of these separately if you’ve shopped for a TV in the past few years, but together, they promise improvements to both of their individual parts.
The hybrid technology takes the self-illuminated pixels of an OLED panel and enhances the colors by converting blue LED pixels to pure red and pure green pixels through a quantum dot layer. Without using filters, colors transformed by the quantum dot layer loses very little energy, allowing the panel to create a wider range of colors and a higher peak brightness than a regular white OLED screen.
The result is a monitor with a 99.3% DCI-P3 color coverage and a Delta-E color accuracy of below 2. If that’s all gibberish to you, it means colors should look vibrant yet natural. Even more impressive is the 1,000-nit brightness rating which might well burn through your retinas if you aren’t careful.
We’ll comment more on the display quality once we get one of these into our (home) office; until then, we can only ogle at the specs. These include a 34-inch, 3440 x 1440-pixel display with a gentle 1800R curve, a 175Hz refresh rate (over DisplayPort, HDMI is limited to 100Hz), and a 0.1-millisecond gray-to-gray response time. The panel supports VESA DisplayHDR 400 True Black and has an anti-reflective coating to reduce glare. And in case anything was missing, the Alienware is Nvidia G-Sync Ultimate certified and includes low blue-light technology.
If you somehow pull your eyes away from the panel, you’ll find a stand that will match the rest of Alienware’s products. Pushing the sci-fi aesthetic, the monitor has a sleek white-and-black color scheme with RGB lighting on the rear, bottom, power button, and customizable on a loop centered on the rear monitor. The monitor is height adjustable and can swivel (-20 to 20 degrees), slant (-5 to 5 degrees), and tilt (-5 to 21 degrees).
Picture settings, including the ability for content creators to swap between DCI-P3 and RGB color ranges, can be adjusted via the OSD 5-axis joystick. Ports are positioned on the bottom and include dual HDMI 2.0 inputs, a DisplayPort 1.4, two USB downstream inputs, one USB upstream, and separate audio and headphone jacks.
Alienware hasn’t revealed pricing but it’s safe to assume this thing will cost a small (or perhaps not so small) fortune when it arrives in North America on March 29 and in Europe on April 5.
Update on Jan 13: A typo in Alienware’s press materials said the resolution was 3440 x 1400. We’ve updated this article with the actual resolution: 3440 x 1440.