My favourite ultrawide, the 34-in Alienware AW3423DW QD-OLED, is £156 off at Dell UK
The QD-OLED marvel sees its first major discount for Black Friday.
Dell's Alienware AW3423DW is my favourite ultrawide monitor, thanks to its beautiful 34-inch QD-OLED screen that offers perfect blacks, near-instant pixel response times and gorgeous colours. With wide-screen 1440p (3440x1440) resolution and a 175Hz refresh rate, it's both detailed and responsive, and it looks the part too with a very cool space-y design.
I was lucky enough to review one for several months for Digital Foundry - I think Dell forgot about it for a while - so I consider it my duty to inform you that it is now on sale for the first time ever, dropping from £1099 to £943 - still a big chunk of change, but a fitting Black Friday price for one of the best monitors on the market of any description, hands down.
Dell (and its Alienware subsidiary) make a ton of great monitors, but the difference here is that this is one of just a handful to use a Quantum Dot OLED display from Samsung. This tech offers better brightness and is less sensitive to burn-in than traditional OLED displays, yet still provides the colours, contrast and all the other great qualities that make OLEDs so desirable as both monitors and TVs. This also means that, as well as being great for gaming, this is an awesome monitor for watching film and TV, even though 16:9 content is surrounded by (perfectly black!) bars on either side.
I could go on about why this Dell monitor is so lovely, but I fear it'll quickly descend into mindless gibbering. Let me turn to the more sternly written review, lifted from my write-up on Eurogamer:
The Dell Alienware AW3423DW is the best 1440p ultrawide we've ever tested [with] infinite contrast with perfectly inky blacks, a wide colour gamut, instant pixel response times and better brightness (~500nits) than traditional OLED displays. The 3440x1440 175Hz spec is ideal for PC use, whether gaming or content creation, but doesn't suit consoles... motion handling is superb, making this a great monitor for fast-moving games like shooters or racing titles, while the curved 34-inch screen is suitably immersive...
I have to offer a strong recommendation for this monitor, but I should also mention two further quirks of the unique screen tech: the screen could suffer from burn-in, although there are plenty of countermeasures and user habits to prevent this, and the text is not as crisp as most other displays due to a different subpixel structure. Neither of these bothered me during testing, but if you're particularly worried then you should do your own research to arrive at a conclusion.
It's genuinely a fantastic monitor, and I've not known anyone to get it and not fall in love with it, so do consider it if you're in the market for a premium display. If you have any questions that I could potentially answer based on my time with the AW3423DW, do let me know! Cheers.
