Around two months ago I posted a review of the LG 34UM95 ultra-wide monitor, and today I share with you some of my observations after two months of using it.

Issues

Let’s first look at the two problems I noticed right at start. The shaking stand and the back-light bleed. Of course both are still there after two months. But none of them are a deal breaker.

The shaking is there only when I type. I type quiet fast and that can create quite a lot of shaking. Other than that, I have seen none, either when editing or playing games.

The back-light bleed is exactly the same as it was in the beginning, but I’m not sure if I got used to it, or I just ignore it. I almost never notice it. I really thought it would be a bigger problem, but it’s exactly the same as the one burnt pixel on my old monitor. If I don’t look for it, I don’t see it.

Movies

Before I look at work performance, lets first look at the other uses. Watching movies on it is just wonderful. Especially 4K content is great. The monitor on it’s own is not 4K, but it’s close enough for the 21:9 content.

HD content still looks good on it, except for the black bars on 16:9 content. Especially thats the moment when you will be able to see the back-light bleed. But again, it’s not such a huge problem that one could not live with it.

Then there is SD content, and on-line videos, especially Youtube. Both look horrible for different reasons. SD content (anything under 720p) just looks too pixelated on a screen this size. It’s OK when you sit far enough, but not up close. Youtube videos are even worse. Even if they are in 21:9 aspect ration (trailers for instance), Youtube adds black bars on top and bottom to them, so they are 16:9. So when you go full-screen with a video like that, you will have a huge black border around it. The only solution is to download the video and then use a player that can scale it, to get it into a usable full-screen.

Games

I love gaming on this monitor. My PC is not one of the strongest, but it runs all games older than 1 year in a very nice 2560×1080 resolution. That’s actually the smallest 21:9 resolution that is available, so anything smaller and you won’t get fullscreen.

It made me even play more games. Especially first person games are so much impressive on this monitor, than on a 16:10 one. You just see so much more. I play mostly RPGs and strategies, so I don’t really care that much about some huge refresh rates, and I never noticed any lag from the screen.

It’s nice to see that more and more games support this aspect ration natively, and with a little tweaking, I managed to get around 90% of games in my Steam library working quite well. Actually, if you are curious how some of them look, you can check the screenshots under my Steam account, where I uploaded quite a lot of them.

Btw. playing turn based strategies in a 2560×1080 window (Civilization mostly), while you watch a video on the side is just perfect :)

Work

And we are getting to the most important thing, how it is to work on this huge monitor. It’s just great to have so much space to work with. Just wonderful for multitasking.

Either if working with multiple browsers, while editing the blog, huge Lightroom window, to see the images, or editing big panoramas in Photoshop, and seeing the whole image all at once.

It’s quite interesting, that for most things one just does not need the whole screen. Even for Photoshop, I have it only on about 2/3rds of the screen most of the time. I like to have a video playing on the side, so that works very well for me.

Also, if you work with modern windows apps, the size works great with the window snapping. Having a Skype chat snapped on the side works just perfectly, and due to the ration it does not even feel like it’s taking up space.

Overall

Overall I don’t regret buying it. It’s a very impressive monitor, and it was well worth the money.