Philips 349X7 QHD Curved FreeSync Monitor Review

A Closer Look

The clue is in the name with “ultrawide” as the display is pretty freaking wide. Rocking the 21:9 format more commonplace in movies, it’s a fantastic way of expanding your workspace. At 34″ the display is massive anyway. However, it’s vertical height is much lower than it would be on a 34-” 16:9 panel, so it doesn’t feel quite as imposing.

The slight curve on the display is quite nice, as it’s not as curved as some on the market. Personally, I prefer flat displays, but for ultrawide, that wrap around feel works exceptionally well, especially for immersion while gaming. The stand on this monitor is stunning, with an all-metal design. It allows for a huge range of height and tilt adjustments too. Unfortunately, you cannot turn it left or right, but you can achieve that by turning both the monitor and its stand as required.

Gaming

The panel is stunning, and the colours look as good as you would expect for a premium display. Nothing looks over or under saturated, there’s no overly strong blue tint, and the backlight doesn’t show any sign of torching in the corners or light bleeding on the edges. When it comes to gaming, playing Forza 7 shows amazing depth and helps with the sensation of speed as the landscape races to the sides of the display.

Furthermore, Battlefield 1 looks stunning too. Again, for seeing more of the action it works great, and you can see much more going on. There’s less chance of someone running up on you from the side now!

My favourite though has to be Elder Scrolls Online. The beautifully detailed word deserves to be on a huge screen. Of course, for boss fights with 30+ people on screen, you’ll be happy for the extra space to see the action.

Movies

Ultrawide is getting increased support these days, with YouTube now natively supporting it. In fact, all the below shots are from YouTube trailers; you can see that in action here. 16:9 content will of course display with black bars on the left and right though. Movies that are shot in wider display formats, and there are plenty, will now fill the screen rather than have black bars at the top and bottom; as they would on 16:9 displays. It’s a pro and cons thing, something things do look a lot better here though.