Alienware 34 QD-OLED was the most important monitor of 2022
When I first laid eyes on him Alienware 34 QD-OLEDI knew it was something special.
Maybe not so much from the outside. There’s nothing wrong with Alienware’s sci-fi white design, which takes inspiration from movies like THX1138, ForgotY 2001: A Space Odyssey. But we’ve seen that before.
promising panel
It was the panel itself that made it such an important monitor this year. It’s the first gaming monitor to use one of Samsung’s. QD-OLED panels. It was announced and released together with the Samsung’s first QD-OLED TVs Y sony, which was a rarity in its own right. The latest panel technology often goes to TVs first, while computer monitors they are often many years behind schedule.
But that’s starting to change, and the Alienware 34 QD-OLED is a great example of that.
Despite that positive development, this monitor remains the sole carrier of this technology in the monitor world this year. It’s still the only QD-OLED monitor you can buy this year. Both Samsung and MSI has announced its own modelsmost notably the OLED version of the popular Odyssey G9but he also did not make it out in 2022.
The crazy part? Alienware actually released two of these models, with a second launching in the second half of the year. that was a bit cheaper and aimed at AMD gamers.
So yes, Alienware seems to have had an exclusive with these QD-OLED panels, and that makes this monitor special on its own. But being unique wouldn’t matter much if the technology itself wasn’t impressive. It’s the incredible image quality that made the Alienware 34 QD-OLED a standout this year.
The vast majority of PC gamers have never experienced good HDR performance.
The advance that QD-OLED provides is even more significant with Alienware 34 QD-OLED than with TVs. After all, there are already really strong options in the world of high-end TVs that can rival Samsung’s QD-OLED panels. OLED and mini-LED are already prominent technologies in the TV space, but in the world of monitors, they’re still extremely rare. The few OLED monitors that exist come in massive screen sizes that are impractical for most people. Instead, IPS and VA are still the most common panel types for monitors, even if you’re buying one of the more expensive ones. gaming monitors you can buy.
These forms of backlighting simply don’t have the brightness and contrast provided by OLED or mini-LEDs. That means the vast majority of PC gamers have never experienced good HDR performance. And that’s where the most notable benefits of the Alienware 34 QD-OLED come into play.
preview of the future
Gaming in HDR on the Alienware 34 QD-OLED looks amazing. The combination of 1200 nits peak brightness and OLED’s extreme contrast delivers HDR performance that can finally compete with some of the best TVs around. In games that support it like cyberpunk 2077 either Shadow of the Tomb Raiderimages are completely transformed with this new range of color and light, all without overloading your GPU.
In a world where Nvidia and AMD offer multiple ways to increase frame rates (sometimes to the detriment of visuals), proper HDR doesn’t require adjusting texture quality or DLSS settings. And yet, there’s no question that these games look significantly better in HDR.
In that way, the Alienware 34 QD-OLED feels like a preview of the future of PC gaming. As more and more OLED and mini-LED monitors become available, developers will (hopefully) be incentivized to incorporate it into more games. The first 27-inch OLED gaming monitors are already in the works, and by the end of 2023 there should finally be a variety of options that have decent HDR performance.
It won’t happen overnight, but gaming monitors are finally catching up with TVs, and we’ll look back on the Alienware 34 QD-OLED as one of the biggest releases to fuel this trend.
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