Saturday, September 3, 2016

Eyes On With Samsung's 34-Inch Curved Gaming Monitor


BERLIN—Gamers want the best graphics, delivered at the fastest speeds, on the sharpest monitors. And now they can have it all with curves. On Thursday at IFA, Samsung unveiled three curved gaming monitors: the CFG70, available in 24 or 27 inches, and the CF791, a 34-inch model. All three monitors use Samsung's quantum dot technology. I got to take a look at Samsung's booth.
The 34-inch CF791 packs a 3,440-by-1,440 display, while the smaller CFG70 models come in at 1,920 by 1,080. Design-wise, the CFG70 monitors are black, while the CF791 comes in white. They all sport very thin bezels, and have ball-and-joint mechanisms in the neck that you can tilt and rotate to adjust height without moving the base.

Samsung's quantum dot technology is already available in its line of Ultra HD TVs. According to the company, it makes for better color accuracy and a sharper picture. That certainly appears to be true based on what I saw at the show. The latest Call of Duty and some sports titles really popped. On the wider CF791 I also got to try Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, which is a weird game to use to showcase gorgeous graphics, since it's pretty bland.
With AMD graphics cards that use FreeSync, the monitors have screen refresh rates ranging from 100Hz for the CF791 to 144Hz for the CFG70. And each CFG70 monitor has input delay of only 1ms. Basically, that means games played on the smaller screens (with AMD cards) will have less input lag and stutter (the larger CF791 has 4ms of lag).

A user interface called Gaming UX, which pops up over the screen's image with the press of a button (behind the bezel), has options for picture modes, black equalizers, and motion blur. But this feature looked incomplete on the monitors I saw, and it's only available on the CFG70 models.
All three monitors will be available in the fourth quarter of 2016. The 24-inch CFG70 costs $399, the 27-inch model goes for $499, and the CF791 is $999.

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