Recently I found a good deal on some new monitors for my desk setup.
Previously I was running a pair of 29 inch Ultra-wide displays. They were great for when I was working given that they let me keep multiple documents side by side and deal with larger spreadsheets. However they were not great for gaming, and given that I’m not working from home now they were starting to chafe a bit when I was working on them for personal projects.
The first thing was that they where wider than a normal 1080p monitor, but they where the same vertical height than a 24 Inch 1080p display, just a wider version of the same And while that’s nice for keeping two word documents side by side it’s not really as useful when you are working on editing photos.
The other problem with them from my viewpoint was that they didn’t go faster than a 75hz refresh rate. So while they worked for gaming they were not really as smooth as I would have liked them to be. As well the wider aspect ratio would sometimes mess up how games displayed things like the HUD or controls in the game.
I’ve been looking at replacements for a while, but anything that’s ultra-wide, larger than what I had, and with a higher resolution was running well into the 1000$ range by the time that I found something that I like the feature set of. A lot of the less expensive VA monitors just didn’t dial in the colours correctly and a lot of the IPS ones didn’t have the faster refresh rate that I wanted. So for something that’s going to be used mainly for messing with photos and gaming you kind of needed something with decent colours and a faster refresh.
Dropping back to a “normal” 16×9 display I wound up finding some LG Ultragear displays for a good price. And while I’m kind of missing the wider aspect ratio these displays have a better peak brightness, better colour rendition, and a higher resolution than the devices that they are replacing so for now they are fitting the bill well.
Them being on sale for 80$ less than they normally sell for didn’t hurt the decision either.