Gadgetory

welcome back to hard Rome box with the first monitor review of 2019 hopefully with many more to come what we're looking at today is a new beastly monitor from vo-tech the su w 49 C which I assume stands for super ultra wide 49 C this monitor features a 49 inch 38 40 by 1080 panel so it has a 32 9 aspect ratio hence the term super ultra wide because it's a hot wider than traditional 21:9 monitors biotech is pitching this as a gaming monitor so it packs a 144 Hertz maximum refresh rate with free sync there's also HDR support and it's using a curved VA panel which shouldn't come as a surprise I actually think a 32 9 monitor would really suck if it wasn't curved so no complaints from me about the 1800 hour curvature used here this thing is so wide that the slight curve just helps to bring in the peripheries better interview now you might be wondering why would you even want such a wide monitor and the answer is simple it's the equivalent of 227 inch 1080p monitors side-by-side but without the bezel between them that sort of configuration is quite common to see so this monitor is essentially combining what used to be a dual screen setup into the one very wide panel when you think of it as replacing two displays rather than just as a massive ridiculously wide single panel does make a lot more sense for gamers you also get the advantage of extra width for better immersion a while back a lot of people getting into multi monitor gaming setups using things like aim DS Eyefinity technology but it never really took off because it didn't work that well 21:9 monitors came in and basically replaced multi-monitor setups and now these 32:9 displays are providing even more immersion closer to what multi-monitor setups used to provide but without the hassle of course not every game supports village' no displays but in those that do having the extra width adds a lot to the experience so that's the use case for a 49 inch super ultra wide panel like this I think what via tech is providing here does tick both those boxes on the gaming side you have a high refresh rate with free sync and on the productivity side there are features like picture-in-picture so you can have two sources hooked up just playing them side-by-side like it should dual screen setup but without a bezel in between there's also an included remote I'm not sure how many people will be using this sort of display more as a TV than as a monitor though of course via tech it's also known for making highly affordable monitors this one comes in at 800 US dollars which again makes it the cheapest in its category sure 800 bucks is still a fair bit of money but its main competitors are the Samsung C 49 J 890 and C 49 HG 90 both of which are around a thousand US dollars we'll take a look at how this monitor performs in a moment but we've been impressed with via text value propositions in the past in terms of aesthetics this monitor is a simple affair there's no crazy game elements it's just a nice basic design with reasonably slim bezels the reuses a basic matte plastic while The Stand uses a combination of black metal black plastic and a shiny silver bar for such a wide display the stand is pretty damn sturdy much more so than summer vitex smaller displays which is a bit of a surprise they're the real bits of flair vo-tech added to the design are the red ring around the stance connection to the rear and an illuminated RGB LED at the top of the stand pillar the controls for the LED are basic you can choose to either turn on or off the red green or blue elements with no granular control or you can simply disable it entirely as readjust ability you don't get a whole lot here there's no tilt or swivel support understandably for a monitor of this size however there's also no height adjust feature like ordered via Tech's other displays I feel that the s UW 49c sits too low and together sitting higher you'll need to replace the stand with a third-party vasive mount height adjustment on a monitor of this size I'm sure is a complex task but what we're left with here is only tilt adjustment support for inputs we get a single DisplayPort 1.2 port plus three HDMI ports one of which is HDMI 2.0 compliant there's also an audio jack and the monitor has built-in speakers which as you might expect aren't particularly amazing disappointingly vitek continues to use basic 4 button controls for the on-screen display although you can control the settings using the included remote so it's not as big of an issue as with their past monitors aside from the picture-in-picture modes I already described you get a fairly typical range of settings and controls in the OSD here you mine with via Tex other high-end displays this is great to see because via text Reaper Manos use a really basic on-screen display with basically zero functionality but with this display you're getting a lot more features let's talk about performance now and the su w 49 sees a little strange in some areas for example the monitor does have an overdrive mode which biotech claim will deliver a formula ii response time however you cannot use overdrive in conjunction with the maximum 144 hertz refresh rate for some bizarre reason the setting is disabled and greyed out at 144 hertz but is accessible at 120 hertz or lower this isn't something I've seen before it's pretty strange to have no overdrive functionality at the maximum refresh rate but usable overdrive at lower refreshes for our testing we always test response times at the panel's maximum refresh rate because if you're buying a 144 Hertz monitor you'll want to be using it at 144 Hertz so without overdrive the ASUW 49c is a bit of a poor performer with an average greater gray response time of ten point five four milliseconds putting it among the slowest monitors we've tested in this metric some transitions were up above fifteen milliseconds which is standard for a VA panel without overdrive this makes the su w 49c a poor 144 Hertz monitor because response times are limiting performance to more like a hundred Hertz in the 144 Hertz mode it's also one of those strange situations where response times are better at 120 Hertz simply because overdrive is available at that refresh rate I'd be curious to see how this monitor would vary overdrive worked at 144 Hertz but right now I'd suggest most buyers treat this display as a 120 Hertz panel and use overdrive to get better performance than the 144 Hertz mode provides it's a bit disappointing consuming this is advertised as a 144 Hertz panel but that's the way its shipping as for input lag I've revamped my input lag test for 2019 and I'm currently in the process of retesting a whole suite of monitors I still have access to with fresh and more accurate data unfortunately though that means I don't have any comparison points or graphs for you in this review however I can say the ASUW 49c has very good input lag characteristics with lag around the 6.9 millisecond mark brightness exceeded via text claims boasting a maximum of 319 it's higher than the 320 nits listed in the spec sheet contrast ratio is also very strong at over 4,500 to 1 again much higher than the spec sheet lists however there is a bit of fall-off to contrast when lowering the brightness at maximum brightness we're looking at over forty nine hundred to one but at a more comfortable 200 nits we're down to 46 63 to one that's what'll fall off isn't ideal but at least the overall contrast ratio is still very strong unfortunately Vitek has made a common mistake when it comes to color performance they did not clamp this monitors gamut - srgb and there is no mode in the on-screen display that does so this panel is capable of wider than srgb gama - boasting 88% DCI p3 coverage as opposed to 75% which is typical for an sRGB only display and that in itself you know it's not a bad thing if you want to harness a wider gamut for some use cases however without a mode that limits the displayed srgb the su w 49 sees default behavior is to over saturate colors this is because your operating system is providing sRGB image data to the display which is then stretched to fit the wider Galant of the monitor and srgb mode would fix this problem and provide more accurate performance this issue affects default color performance such as saturation and color checker delta-e averages which are above 3.40 here indicating mediocre performance the monitor also ships with an incorrect white balance of around 7200 K instead of a proper 6500 K which leads to a blue tint or cold tone this leads to mediocre greyscale performance of a three point six zero Delta II average with weak Gama while the unclamped gamut cannot be fixed with the on screen display you can at least fix the white balance with a few tweaks I was able to improve performance however delta ii averages remain above 2.0 across our grayscale saturation and color checker test which is a pre average result ideally you would want those values under 2.0 or in the best case under 1.0 but that's not possible without a full calibration performing a full calibration using spectra Cal's calment 5 fixes the gamma issue and also addresses the rest of the issues with the panel as you'd expect we're then left with Delta a averages under one pointer across the board are corrected gamma curve and proper white balance however because these fixes were achieved with a software profile only application that actually support color management like Photoshop for example we'll apply the fixes unmanaged apps including the Windows desktop environment basically ignore this profile which is why we prefer monitors they can be corrected using on-screen controls if you're interested in our profile we created for the su w 49 see we have least to download that through our patreon page in the description below final aspect of performance is uniformity and this is perhaps the worst aspect to the su w 49c it's hard to get a backlight of this size with a curve to produce a uniform output and V attack has struggled here the outer edges are significantly different from the center with my review unit to the tune of Delta YZ above 8.0 and it's reasonably obvious when viewing solid colors or shades oh and there is actually one more thing I nearly forgot about HDR performance given Biotek advertises this as an HDR capable monitor I think you may be Viator forgot about this as well because simply put this is not an HDR display the HDR experience is actually worse than standard SDR because the panel cannot get the brightness output even in the right ballpark so I just forget about the panel supporting HDR and make your buying decision purely on its SDR performance all up the vo-tech su w 49c is going to give you a typical vo-tech experience it's the same panel and specifications as bigger manufacturers like Samsung with a few hundred dollars shaved off the price you do sacrifice some performance but the experience is largely the same which is why it's a great option for those that want good bang for buck my main areas of concern are the lack of overdrive when running at 144 Hertz which makes the su w 49 City effectively a 120 Hertz display along with the unclamped color gamut and poor uniformity the uniformity issue can't be fixed the color gamut problem is mitigated to an extent with calibration and most V air panels can't truly deliver a 144 Hertz experience anyway due to slow response times in fact I suspect a lot of people will get caught up on the response times of the su w 49 C but with around 8 millisecond response is at 120 Hertz that's in line with most other V air panels I've tested occasionally you can get the rare unit that does actually do 144 Hertz but when you understand that response times are an issue for all the air pounds it's really not as bad as at first outs aside from those issues the SVW 49c performs well it has an excellent contrast ratio great input lag it supports free sync with low framerate compensation the design is nice and it has neat features like side by side picture-in-picture which makes the panel also decent for productivity due to its size and aspect ratio it's more of a niche product but for those after a 32 9 panel you're going to get an experience pretty close to Samsung's competing display for about $200 less which is what we like to see the only reason I'd offer something like the Samsung c49 HD 90 at this point would be to get its superior HDR performance but even then the Samsung chg series doesn't deliver amazing HDR anyway for all other buyers and especially those with calibration tools or those that don't really care all that much about color accuracy or over saturation I'd go for the $800 biotech su w 49c instead and that's it for this monitor review we'll have more of these reviews coming up throughout 2019 so stay tuned to Hardware boxed as we continue to expand our monitor testing consider supporting us on patreon to get access to our exclusive discord chat and monthly live streams and I'll catch you in the next one