The gaming arm of Dell had a host of new products announced at this week’s CES show. The one getting most of my attention is what Alienware dubs the ‘world’s first Quantum Dot OLED gaming monitor.’
Touting a 34in panel with a 3440×1440 resolution is nothing special, and we have seen the subtle 1800R curve implemented before. Alienware takes it up a notch by having a maximum G-Sync Ultimate refresh rate of 175Hz over DisplayPort or 100Hz over slower HDMI.
Best of both worlds?
The real kicker is the type of panel used. Quantum Dot OLED (QD-OLED) is a new technology pioneered by Samsung and shown off on prototype TVs at CES. In short, QD-OLED seeks to provide higher brightness and better colours than traditional OLEDs by using Quantum Dots, which are tiny molecules that emit a particular wavelength of light depending upon their size.
This tech has been seen before in the LCD world, and Samsung has been a champion of this brighter-panel approach for a while. Melding QDs with OLEDs, hence QD-OLEDs, Samsung/Alienware wants the best of both worlds: the inky blacks emanating from OLEDs and higher brightness and supposedly better colour from Quantum Dots.
It’s difficult to gauge the effectiveness of such an approach through specifications and explanation alone, but we’re intrigued to find out if Alienware’s newest screen is as good as the literature contends.
In other specs, the panel boasts a 99.3 per cent DCI-P3 gamut, 149 per cent sRGB. Creators can switch between the two colour spaces via a preset. Response time is listed as an industry-leading 0.1ms GTG, while there are two HDMI ports and a single DisplayPort alongside USB 3.2
All that said, the screen has DisplayHDR True Black 400 certification, which is a decent standard for OLED displays.
No word on pricing. Availability is scheduled for around the April time frame.
