LG Ultragear 34GS95QE

Introduction

While the LG 34GS95QE’s use of OLED technology makes it a potentially strong AV as well as gaming monitor, its 21:9 native aspect ratio (with an Ultra WQHD resolution) and curved screen immediately mark it out as one of the brand’s most specifically game-focused monitors.

A status it underlines with a healthy gaming feature count that includes NVIDIA G-Sync and AMD Freesync Premium Pro support, 240Hz refresh rates and a claimed 0.03ms response time.

Gamers will be painfully aware that the sort of screen size and specs the 34GS95QE boasts would typically come attached to a four-figure price tag, but I’m happy to report that following a recent round of price cutting, the LG’s MLA OLED monitor can now be had for just £629. So could we have a bona fide serious gaming bargain on our hands?

Design

• Easy to construct
• Beautifully finished curved design
• Good range of adjustments

The LG 34GS95QE looks and feels exactly like you’d hope a premium monitor would look and feel. While its curved screen might be chunky round the back, the curved rear panel is beautifully smooth and crisply finished. The neck stand is cleanly and elegant too, while the metallic hexagonal stand the monitor sits on looks good and feels impressively heavy duty.

Neat LG and Ultragear logos are etched into the front left and right sides of the desktop pedestal, and the screen is edged in an impressively slender outer frame. Plus, as we’re increasingly starting to expect with premium monitors, the no-nonsense black finish of the rear panel can be illuminated by two stripes of coloured lights that angle down to either side of the stand neck. You can, of course, set these lights to output pretty much any colour you choose.

Despite the quality of its build, the 34GS95QE is easy to assemble. A pair of simple finger screws attach the base and screen to either end of the neck mount, and from there you can raise, lower, tilt or angle the screen to your heart’s content.

Unlike the Samsung S27FG810S, you can’t rotate the screen through 90 degrees to make it vertical – but I guess the demand for this is pretty limited. Especially with the sort of gaming crowd keen on buying a 21:9 aspect ratio display.

Cables can be tidied up by feeding them through an oval hole cut just below the mid-section of the stand neck, and the connections themselves are par for the premium monitor course with two HDMI inputs, one 1.4-gen DisplayPort, a USB 3.0 Upstream Port, two USB 3.0 downstream ports and a four-pole (sound+mic) headphone jack.

Image Quality

• Spectacular contrast and brightness peaks
• Excellent response time and motion clarity
• Brilliant sharpness and detail

Stepping up to an MLA (actually, LG calls this one MLA+!) panel for the 34GS95E takes LG’s already dependably brilliant OLED gaming monitors to a whole new level – at least when it comes to brightness and contrast.

Provided you’ve unleashed the monitor’s maximum brightness potential by setting peak brightness to high, making sure the Brightness setting is 100, selecting the Gamer 1 image preset, and turning off the Smart Energy mode, tests using Portrait Displays Calman Ultimate monitor evaluation software, G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 colorimeter found the 34GS95QE hitting remarkably high peaks of just over 1200 nits on a 1% HDR test window.

The brightness holds up at just over 1000 nits on a 2% window too, and 800 nits on a 5% window. Even the 600 nits it manages to produce on a 10% window is still high by OLED monitor standards.

If you haven’t optimised the 34GS95QE for brightness as described above, its measured light profile is very different.

Now the brightest it gets is around 570 nits, but it sustains this same measurement across every measurement window from 1% to 10%, and only drops off around 70 nits on a 25% window. In other words, with Peak Brightness off, in particular, you get a more consistent visual experience if that’s what you’re looking for.

Personally, though, with game graphics I didn’t really feel aware of any serious inconsistencies caused by the Peak Brightness feature, and instead really enjoyed the extra punch, highlighting and general intensity the Peak Brightness feature introduces.

Especially since, in time-honoured OLED tradition, the 34GS95QE’s new MLA-inspired levels of brightness are still able to appear right alongside beautifully inky, natural and consistent black colours.

While there are certainly brighter monitors out there, at least when it comes to showing full-screen bright graphics (it tops out at 280 nits on a full 100% HDR window, and more like 250 nits with the Peak Brightness setting engaged), those brighter full-screen monitors will be LCD models, and so won’t be capable of delivering the sort of black level depth and consistency that the 34GS95QE can.

The only other monitors I’ve tested that get close to the 34GS95QE’s contrast performance would be the Samsung S27FG810S and LG’s own 32GS95UE – and the Samsung model, glorious though it is, dips lower than the LG at the key 10% and 25% HDR window size, and reins its HDR peaks in to more like 450 nits in its dedicated Game AV and Game PC modes.

As well as managing to express more of the true expanded light range of HDR graphics than most if not all other monitors, the 34GS95QE fills in all the light subtleties between its outstanding bright and dark extremes beautifully. Subtleties of shading and blending are consistently excellent, and no faint shadow detail or hidden enemy is crushed out into the darkness.

There’s always a fear with the WRGB types of OLED screen LG uses in its TVs and monitors that high brightness might lead to slightly washed out colours. There’s no evidence of this on the 34GS95QE, though.

On the contrary, the extra brightness just seems to unlock more vibrant and voluminous colours that play beautifully with the best graphics the latest HDR games are now delivering – from PC or console. Calman Ultimate measurements show the monitor covering more than 99% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut – as well as 134%, 133.2% and 89.1% of the SDR Rec 709, SRGB and Adobe RGB colour spectrums respectively.

There’s accuracy to its colours, too, as in its untinkered with AV and PC modes it scores only a Delta E error of 3.3 and 3.9 respectively in Calman ColorChecker tests. That’s marginally above the 3.0 level that’s considered completely indistinguishable to the human eye, but it’s highly unlikely all but the most trained eye will detect any potential colour errors with these numbers.

Viewing angles are typically outstanding for an OLED monitor, meanwhile – though don’t forget, that the screen is curved, which introduces a different viewing angle limitation and is basically a massive incentive to stay sat in the monitor’s ‘sweet spot’ as much as possible.

The QHD resolution (3440 x 1440) panel delivers pictures with outstanding sharpness and clarity, backed up by the excellent subtlety of its colours, the pixel-level nature of its light control, and the ability to handle both 240Hz native refresh rates and all of the Nvidia G-Sync, AMD FreeSync Premium Pro and VESA-certified AdaptiveSync variable refresh rate approaches.

LG quotes a 0.03ms GtG response time for the 34GS95QE’s screen, too, and I measured input lag even with 60Hz signals at just 8.8ms.

There are a couple of small performance niggles to report. One rather unfair one is that most games don’t natively fill the screen’s 21:9 aspect ratio, leaving black bars at the left and right side. LG does, though, provide Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 settings that deliver some of the most effective scaling I’ve seen for expanding 16:9 graphics and video to fill the screen without the results becoming soft or looking obviously stretched.

The Peak Brightness feature can cause highlights of HDR images to look a bit too peaky and stressy with video playback. But of course, all you need to do in such circumstances is turn the feature off. At which point, apart from some judder with vertical pans, the 34G95QE is actually a rather excellent little video display, despite its clear gaming focus.

One final niggle you can’t really get rid of is some visible flickering with VRR feeds. This is usually only noticeable, though, in menu screens rather than during gameplay.

Software and features

• 21:9 native aspect ratio
• 0.03ms GtG response time
• No built-in speakers

The LG UltraGear 34GS95QE’s 34-inch, ultra-wide, curved, QHD-resolution, 240Hz OLED screen is really its star feature. But there’s more to LG’s monitor than this. Starting with the fact that it hits VESA’s DisplayHDR True Black 400 certification, and achieves the extremely high VESA’s ClearMR 13000 level of certification for motion clarity.

The screen also carries Anti-glare and low reflection technology which, while not as extreme as the filters used on Samsung’s latest monitors, does at least take the sting out of reflections from your room.

Contrast is rated by LG at 1.5M:1, and handily given its width the screen can show images from two inputs simultaneously via Picture In Picture and Picture By Picture presentation options.

The monitor is controlled via an excellent gaming-focused menu system that’s one of the clearest and most well-featured such systems in the monitor world. Features available through this menu system include Dynamic Action sync to reduce input lag, a Black Stabiliser feature that increases the brightness of dark areas exclusively to make enemies hiding in the shadows easier to spot, and a superimposed crosshair.

LG provides a few features for combatting the permanent image retention that can affect OLED screens, including a simple screen saver, an OLED Screen Move option which shifts the image around the screen slightly at regular intervals, and an Image Cleaning system. Though there’s nothing on the level of the localised coolant piping system that you get in Samsung’s more expensive FG810SU displays.

Unlike some recent LG monitors, the 34GS95QE doesn’t support 480Hz refresh rates – but of course, 240Hz will be more than enough for the vast majority of gamers, at least for now. There’s no support for the Dolby Vision HDR format, either; you just get HDR10.

And while the 34GS95QE is clearly aimed at PC gamers with pretty high-end rigs, it’s worth mentioning that I couldn’t get the monitor to show 4K/120Hz from the Xbox Series X unless I set the console’s output colour depth to 24bits per pixel (8-bit).

As noted earlier, the 34GS95QE’s onscreen menu system is excellent. Pretty much as easy on the eye, clear to follow and well organised as it gets in the gaming monitor world. It’s a shame that LG hasn’t included a remote control, perhaps, but the little joystick-type menu navigator tucked behind the screen’s bottom edge is one of the more effective such controllers I’ve come across, avoiding the over-sensitivity and ‘stickiness’ of some rivals.

One last feature the 34GS95QE does not have that I should be absolutely clear about before heading in to my conclusion is any built-in speakers.

Should you buy it?

FAQs