Review on Acer XZ342CK Pbmiiphx Certified DisplayHDR400 Ultrawide Screen, 3440X1440, High Dynamic Range & Curved Design by Ray Dominguez

First I need to pass this on to Acer so they ship their monitors in the correct shipping boxes. The box that this monitor came in didn't look particularly fancy with all sorts of pretty graphics, but it was made out of very thick and sturdy cardboard. As soon as you open the box (it wasn't easy), you're greeted by two very large pieces of styrofoam, each taking up a full side of the box. These are thick and very strong pieces of foam with a monitor in the middle. You really have to be a careless courier to damage this monitor in any way. Acer really knew what they were doing when designing the packaging boxes. Although my Revain driver was great and there wasn't even a small stain on my box. The monitor attaches to the base with relative ease (unless you're using a Vesa mount), but you'll need a standard Phillips head. Screwdriver to attach the arm to the back of the monitor (4 screws) The arm is attached to a heavy metal base (plastic coated) and there is a large thumbscrew on the underside of the base for easy hand tightening. By using the included mount and base instead of the VESA mount, you can rest assured that the monitor is securely attached to the mount. Not only is the base unit heavy, but it's also a big piece that won't go anywhere on its own. It would take a very strong earthquake to topple this monitor and I doubt the monitor can be knocked over with as much base as it has. Your home or office is likely to fall first when the monitor tips over in front of the monitor. I've seen several reviews where people received their new monitor and it had dead pixels or small scratches that were very noticeable when turned on. . My monitor arrived in perfect condition. No dead pixels and no scratches. I connected mine via displayport and it took very little tweaking. My AMD graphics card detected that the monitor had Freesync Premium installed and enabled it by default. Since I connected it via the display port, the refresh rate was 144Hz out of the box and stayed at 144Hz the whole time. Implementing HDR looks more like a crazy experiment than real HDR, but it gives you some of the benefits of HDR, albeit it's not full HDR, it's still better than none at all. I left this setting on Auto and I appreciate the games that use it. The image quality is quite good overall. It looks really good and friends are very impressed, but I think it's more because of the size of this beast than anything else. The display's brightness is adequate, but I found that I set the brightness between 85% and 90%, which leaves very little room for brightness. It's in my house where direct sunlight never hits the screen, so I don't think brightness (or lack thereof) will ever be an issue for me, but if you're considering buying one of these monitors, be yourself aware of that. that direct sunlight can render it unusable in your home if sunlight hits the display directly. If you can place it where the sun doesn't shine that would be perfect. My only minor complaint has to do with its brilliant innovation. Instead of a power button and then 3 or 4 other buttons for navigating and selecting options in the OSD, this monitor has a small joystick on the lower right side of the display. You push it in (or up) to turn on the monitor, and the same motion, but then hold it for 5 seconds to turn off the monitor. Once activated, pushing the joystick up into the case activates the menus, highlighting, and selecting menu items. You move the joystick left, right, forward, and backward to navigate the menu system. This is actually a brilliant way to solve the problem of not being able to read which key does what on systems with many keys. It would be particularly frustrating if the buttons were on the bottom of the monitor like a joystick, as it would be very difficult to read which button does what. The idea of a small joystick is ingenious, but the implementation is not. The joystick has play and can easily be accidentally moved in any direction when trying to push it up to make a selection. This is very frustrating when trying to make a selection in a menu when the menu highlight moves to the next item right before the selection. It took me over 3 minutes to switch from HDMI1 input to DP1 input. MORE THAN 3 MINUTES! This is madness. The more I get used to the quirks of the little joystick, the better I can use it to make the right choices, but it's always going to be something to be very careful with. That said, it's a minor complaint and I'll adjust to that, so it's in no way a deal breaker for me. This monitor does a lot and only has one possible brightness issue (when exposed to the sun at any time of the day) and a small joystick issue. These are very minor issues considering how well everything else works on this loaded beast. Just remember that 34 inches is huge when it's just two feet from your face. This monitor really is a beast!