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The BIGGEST UltraWide Ever - LG 38UC99 Review

2016-10-12
it's here the biggest baddest ultra widest monitor yet LG's 38 you see 99 boasts 38 inches of productivity and gaming goodness with higher resolution higher refresh rate more inputs and AMD freesync among the improvements they've made since I first laid eyes on the 34 you see 97 that's been my daily driver at the office since its released nearly two years ago but is it really a step forward can a monitor be simply too big no spoilers so for now the answer is maybe the dark Bass Pro 900 from be quiet features a modular design to support a variety of layouts and configurations check out the link in the video description to learn more let's open with the speeds and feeds the 38 you see 99 rocks a curved IPS 100% srgb rated panel with max brightness that exceeds its 300 NIT rating in my testing and that I would describe as freaking bright I use dark room profile 1 most of the time in my office it runs at a native resolution of 3840 by 1600 which is about 3/4 as many pixels as UHD and it uses the extra bandwidth that it saves to break the 60 Hertz barrier and offer up a 75 Hertz maximum refresh rate on either its DP 1.2 or USB type-c port very refreshing all of this amounts to nearly exactly the same pixel density as the older 34 inch 1440p models and going further back in time the 16 by 10 30 inch monitors that were hugely popular among ball and a spoilers about 10 years ago for good reason it is a great sweet spot because it's basically as fine as you can go with felt scaling something that Windows 8 and prior handled very poorly and even on Windows 10 is imperfect at least from a normal distance I found that with the UC 99 I needed to sit a little further back than I normally do to avoid significant head movements to interact with on-screen elements in the corners hmm let's continue for IO we've got a headphone jack DP 1.2 dual HDMI 2.0 USB type-c that access both an uplink for the Android BC 1.2 fast charge supporting hub and as an alternate plug for the DisplayPort input and on the software side LG's on-screen control has many more window arrangement modes and basically did what it was supposed to so no complaints here the stand though is one step forward one step back I am oh the display clicks into it with no tools required thumbs up and the couple degrees of pivot adjustment actually makes it easier to compensate for slight misalignment but whether it's due to the weight of the panel or the plastic arm I wasn't especially pleased with the screen wobble that I experienced while typing at my desk not on such a premium product the on screen menu is snappy to navigate thanks to the four direction nipple button interface and much quicker onboard processor but to take it one step further I really like to see programmable shortcuts as it is left and right our volume adjustments which makes sense but up and down both just show me my current input and current image profile while clicking the nipple brings up mostly sensible options Bluetooth audio is a neat feature that lets you use the you c99 fairly decent speakers with your phone over bluetooth for me that one would come up a lot less often than wanting to toggle the motion blur reduction mode that claims as low as one millisecond perceived pixel response times when you're running at the maximum 75 Hertz refresh rate over DisplayPort the principle here is similar to Nvidia slight boost it rapidly strobes the backlight simulating the way that a CRT works which results in a noticeable improvement in image sharpness during quick movements in games but it looks like flickering but outside of games and costs 16 interactions with the menu button every time you want to toggle it this could be addressed by the on-screen control application that at least allows picture modes to be adjusted a little more quickly but at this time that only supports a small subset of the monitors onboard controls so some convenience and comfort enhancing features are stuck buried so deep that I suspect many owners of this display will ever even find them I'd like to see some improvement there while we're at it LG's dual link-up picture by picture mode is another great example of solid idea B - implementation it lets you pull up plug in a compatible type C port and boom with that one cable you can have your desktop on the one side you're plugged in peripherals in the monitor working on your laptop and your laptop displayed on the other side and it charges laptops up to 60 watts - with synergy this amazing network mouse and keyboard sharing software that loop showed off here this could be an amazing use case for folks like me who still use their laptop while they're out and about but prefer to sit at the desktop in the evening again though I can't make this the default behavior for when I plug something in and it's 11 clicks to toggle it every time not to mention that if you're using DisplayPort for your desktop for that seventy five Hertz refresh rate you will need to use HDMI for your laptop not the type C input the two DP inputs cannot be used concurrently and while I'm at boneheaded slip-ups in the attention to detail Department what the actual hell were they thinking putting a persistence icon in the bottom right of my screen when I have Bluetooth audio playing I mean if you must have an indicator so that I don't get confused and call support complaining that my speakers aren't working make it pop up when I adjust the volume or have a small LED off screen anything else would have been better than that on to the positive stuff though performance of the panel can't really be faulted backlight bleed was within reason and subjectively viewing angles and uniformity were very strong points especially for a display of this size with color accuracy out of the box in the custom profile of all things being pretty darn close but it does feel a little like LG tried to be everything to everyone and ended up achieving only 80% of every category they're trying to sell the extra screen real estate to content creators but this is a $1,500 srgb panel at the dawn of the age of HDR but while the 75 Hertz refresh rate is an absolute godsend for gamers you can hate on this all you want but I'm not convinced too many of the folks gaming at near 4k resolutions are running AMD Hardware these days and I'd have preferred to separate SKUs and at least 10 bit Adobe RGB preferably rec.709 content creation model and a more gamer specific one with g-sync rather than free sync so LG's not going to like this but while the increased size of the 38 you see 99 makes the 3 by 1 vertical layout noticeably more usable which is a definite plus overall I found myself either sitting back further or moving my head more like I would with a multi-monitor setup rather than being able to take it all in like I can with its 34 inch cousin and I'm not a hundred percent sure that I prefer that it's not that it's a bad monitor at all it's in my top 5 probably even my top 3 but maybe I just came into this expecting an entirely new computing experience like LG has done to me in the past and when that wasn't what I got I was easily annoyed by small oversights that could have been avoided by talking to me for an hour before beginning the product development cycle though I would love to hear from you guys in the comments if you think I completely missed the mark and Jake internally here has already informed me that for his brother this would be amazing because he works on circuit design and the bigger the screen the better speaking of missing the mark you'd be missing the mark if you weren't using Braintree for your mobile app if you're looking for a simple payment solution with the Braintree V dot 0 SDK which is one small snippet of code you can be all set up in less than 10 minutes and if it takes you more than 10 minutes all you're going to do is go a bit that's ok I give up on this call their support staff and they will be happy to walk you through the process over the phone their code supports Android iOS and JavaScript clients and they have SDKs in seven programming languages they make it easy to offer multiple mobile payment types including PayPal Apple pay Bitcoin venmo Android pay credit cards and more all of this with a single integration so to learn more and to get your first 50,000 dollars in transactions with no fees go to Braintree payments comm slash Linus linked in the video description so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome yet subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy this launder or anything else that we feature in our videos at Amazon in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so hey let's assume you're a new viewer and you've never seen our triple 34 inch ultra wide Eyefinity gaming video which you can check out right up there
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