June 2013 pcworld.co.nz 29www.pcworld.co.nz

ULTRA-WIDE: We’re drowning in pixels.

AOC Q2963Pm29-inch LED-backlit IPS monitorAOC’s Q2963Pm is a 29-inch ‘super wide’ monitor, in the uncommon 21:9 aspect ratio with a resolution of 2560 x 1080 pixels.

Most desktop screens today use the 16:9 ratio adopted from HD televisions, with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 (commonly known as 1080p) or 2560 x 1440. The Q2963Pm is 30% wider than that common ratio, and it’s obvious at the briefest glance. It’s almost like having a dual-monitor setup, as it’s nearly as wide as two square-ish office monitors.

Upon first unboxing the Q2963Pm, its super-wide form looked laughable. However, there are at least three groups of users that are going to get tremendous utility from AOC’s latest.

The first is a group of professionals that require a great deal of horizontal screen real estate for the applications they work with. These are the people that tend toward multi-monitor setups – software developers, web designers, analysts, traders and the like. Print designers, photo editors and 3D animators/designers may not be as pleased with the ratio. The extra vertical space offered by 16:9 displays is useful to those sorts of applications.

Despite the size, the Q2963Pm is surprisingly thin and light. It has a dark ‘titanium’ coloured plastic bezel and stand, which provides good stability and tilt adjustment.

If you do want to use the Q2963Pm for photo editing or other design work, it garnered good results from the Spyder4Elite calibration tool, with an overall result of 4 out of 5. Colour and brightness uniformity are good across the screen – matte colours

don’t appear as gradients as they do on many cheaper panels. The only low points were tone response and white point, when calibrated to Gamma 2.2 (both scoring 3.5 out of 5). In short, that means shadows and highlights may not be represented perfectly, and ‘pure’ white may carry an unwanted colour cast.

The second group that will love the Q2963Pm are hardcore film enthusiasts – especially those who live in a small apartment or shared living space, and tend to watch a lot of movies on their PC rather than TV or projector.

Many films, particularly ‘epics’, are shot in the 2.35:1 ratio – the incredibly wide presentation you only get in cinemas. The Q2963Pm’s (nearly) 21:9 ratio works out to 2.37:1 – an almost-perfect fit for true widescreen cinema. However, there’s a catch. Many other films are shot in 1.85:1, much closer to the 16:9 used by TVs and average monitors. Even films shot in the super-wide 2.37:1 format are often cropped to 16:9 for DVD and Blu-ray versions. These factors limit the Q2963Pm’s usefulness in this area.

The third user base for the Q2963Pm is hardcore PC gamers – the sort who will have invested in a high-powered system with a top-end graphics card, or multi-graphics card setup. Anything less won’t be enough to fill the screen’s 2.8 million pixels fast enough in modern games – I was able to run Skyrim at the full 2560 x 1080 resolution on my own ageing gaming PC, for example, but couldn’t get a playable framerate in Crysis 3.

Though it took some getting used to, the Q2963Pm won me over to gaming in 21:9. It makes good use of the human visual field

– narrow vertically but with good peripheral vision. Many games require unofficial tweaks or hacks to work with such wide aspect ratios, however.

Connections offered include VGA, HDMI, MHL (essentially HDMI for smartphones), DVI and DisplayPort. It’s important to note, only a DisplayPort or dual-link DVI connection will allow you to use the screen at its native resolution.

Both input and output DisplayPort connections are provided, allowing you to daisy-chain multiple monitors. The screen supports both picture-in-picture and side-by-side display of two input signals – you could connect up both your laptop and desktop, giving each its own 1280 x 1024 screen, for instance.

AOC’s Q2963Pm is a solid widescreen monitor that should appeal to a wide range of computer users for a variety of purposes. It won’t suit everyone, however, and imaging professionals may be disappointed by the tone response and limited vertical resolution. Harley Ogier

AT A GLANCE● 2560 x 1080 pixel resolution● ‘Super wide’ 21:9 ratio● High image quality, good uniformity● 1,000:1 contrast, 5ms response

LAMPTRON TOUCHRRP incl GST: $1,120 Contact: aocmonitor-anz.comA cinema-wide monitor that fills many niches, but won’t appeal to everyone.

AOC Q2963PM

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