Acer Predator X34 Curved 34-in IPS 3440×1440 G-Sync Monitor Review

Calibration and Viewing Angles

Most monitor vendors today will advertise the color accuracy of their displays to some degree on marketing material, and the Predator X34 is no different. More often than not we find that the out of box experience with monitors can be quite poor, favoring heavy blues and oversaturated colors rather than actual color accuracy.

Actually, we stand corrected! The Acer Predator X34 has very reasonable color reproduction out of the box, with only a handful of readings causing concern. If you were satisfied with this result and didn't bother going further with the calibration process, or even integrating the profile we included below, it would be hard to blame you.

However, doing a full calibration gives us a nearly perfect sRGB representation, pulling back the greens and yellows a bit to balance it out. 

This diagram shows the result in the typical XxY fashion – the color triangle represents the before-calibration result while the dashed line represents (close to) the final result.

Calibration Profile Download

The Windows color profile management interface is a bit of a mess, with the need to select and enable a profile in multiple layers of the interface. The best guide for loading and enabling a profile can be found over at TFTCentral. We used the following tools to generate our own calibration profile:

• Datacolor Spyder 4
• ArgyllCMS (calibration software suite)
• dispcalGUI (Graphical interface for Argyll CMS)
• HCFR (for additional verification and output graphs)

Our calibration profile was created using the lowest calibration speed in a dimly lit room. Here are the required settings if you wish to use our profile:

• User mode
• Brightness: 33
• Red: 46
• Green: 46
• Blue: 50
• Profile download: (HERE)

The above profile was created specifically for a color temperature target of 6500K at a luminance of 120 cd/m2 (nit). Gamma 2.2. Remember that the only way to get a correct calibration on your specific panel is by using a colorimeter on that very panel. The above settings and profile will only get *your* display to a perfect calibration if it has the exact same properties as our test sample. A perfect match is unlikely, but this should get you far closer to calibrated than just running with defaults.

Viewing Angles

Curved screens create some interesting oddities when looking at viewing angles, as the angle at which your eyes are looking at the screen is different when looking at the screen anywhere but the center most point. The curve is built for a single user environment, so looking at the display from the side or above shows some deviance in viewing clarity.

Center

From Bottom

From Top

From Left

Straight on, the monitor looks amazing and, even from alternate angles, the X34 does very well. The side angle is surprisingly good although, from the top, I find it a bit more washed out than we'd like. Overall, this is a great result and one we expected from an IPS screen, even with a curve.

Light Bleed Testing

I have seen reports from other owners of the Predator X34 of somewhat noticeable side light bleed on the display.

It's kind of hard to see, but this is an unedited version of the photo, which is indicative of what our team saw when using the display in a dark room. If you struggle and squint, there is a little bit of light bleed in the upper right corner of the screen. 

This image is heavily edited, lowering the brightness thresholds to accentuate where the light bleed might be seen. This is is no way what you can see with your own vision, but does show where potential for light bleed might occur based on unit to unit variances.