Out of the box the MX34VQ produced a vivid image with plenty of depth. There was a strong cool tint, fortunately easy to correct, and a little extra depth in places due to the ‘2.3’ average gamma. The monitor does not provide any ‘Gamma’ modes and none of the ‘Splendid’ modes have any such effect without upsetting the image in other ways. Fortunately, the gamma tracking was still quite close to the ‘2.2’ curve, as you can see below for our ‘Test Settings’. There is a touch of deviation, mainly for some mid-tones, but many users would actually like this touch of extra depth. Shades are still reproduced faithfully and the gamma handling is perfectly suitable for general usage. Any user who requires a higher level of accuracy would really need to use their own colorimeter/spectrophotometer to frequently calibrate and re-calibrate the monitor, regardless of native gamma handling.



Gamma 'Test Settings'

The monitor also provides a range of ‘Low Blue Light’ (LBL) settings, the most effective of which was ‘Reading Mode’. You can also apply varying degrees of blue light reduction by using the ‘Blue Light Filter’. Although none of these modes proved as effective as the ‘Reading Mode’, they also don’t lower the white point as much and therefore might be preferred by some users during the daytime. For relaxing evening viewing we found ‘Reading Mode’ to be excellent, although preferred to up the sharpness from ‘0’ to ‘50’. It is nice that the monitor offers that sort of flexibility, though, and users should experiment with all of these LBL settings and see what works for them.





For our ‘Test Settings’ we lowered the brightness and changed the ‘Color Temp.’ setting to warm. There was no need for manual colour channel adjustments on our unit, but note that individual units vary. We also set the monitor to 100Hz in Windows and to facilitate that, had it running with ‘DisplayPort Stream’ set to ‘DP 1.2’. We have also included the ‘Trace Free’ setting used, just for reference. Additionally, we disabled the ‘VividPixel’ sharpness-boosting feature – although the difference between the default of ‘25’ and ‘0’ is very slight really and some users may prefer ’25’. Any setting not mentioned here, including contrast, was left at default.





Brightness= 60 (according to preferences and lighting) Brightness= 60 (according to preferences and lighting) Color Temp.= Warm Trace Free= 60 VividPixel= 0 (according to preferences) DisplayPort Stream= DP 1.2 Refresh rate= 100Hz (Windows setting)







A BasICColor SQUID 3 (X-Rite i1Display Pro) was used to measure the luminance of white and black using a range of settings. From these values, static contrast ratios were calculated. This data is shown in the table below, with black highlights indicating the highest white luminance, lowest black luminance and peak static contrast ratio recorded. Blue highlights indicate the results under our ‘Test Settings. Except for the changes already mentioned in the calibration section or this table, assume defaults were used.

The average contrast ratio with only brightness adjusted was 2502:1, excluding the value for ‘0% brightness’ where the black point measurement lacked sufficient accuracy. This does not quite reach the specified 3000:1, but isn’t too far off really and offers similar performance to the eye. It’s certainly beyond the sort of contrast that non-VA LCD technologies can currently achieve and gives a fairly deep and inky look to darker shades. The contrast was reduced slightly with the ‘Blue Light Filter’ active, but remained >2000:1. It dropped further with the stronger adjustments made in ‘Reading Mode’ and also to ‘sRGB Mode’. The latter is a bit curious as it isn’t an emulation setting and doesn’t offer an advantage over modes of the monitor with stronger contrast performance. Following the adjustments made to our ‘Test Settings’, a static contrast of 2329:1 was recorded which is respectable.

The monitor includes a Dynamic Contrast setting called ASCR (ASUS Smart Contrast Ratio), which can be activated in the following ‘Splendid’ modes; ‘Scenery’, ‘Theater’, ‘Game’, ‘Night View’ and ‘Darkroom’. This allows the backlight to adjust its intensity based on the levels of light or dark on the screen. As usual, the backlight is controlled as a single unit and can’t have different sections at different brightness levels. The mode was effective in adjusting the backlight brightness quite rapidly to changing scenes, but as usual we prefer manual control over monitor brightness.





PWM (Pulse Width Modulation)

This monitor does not use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) to regulate backlight brightness. Instead, DC (Direct Current) dimming is used, which means the backlight is considered flicker-free. This will come as welcome news to those sensitive to flickering or other side-effects from PWM.





Luminance uniformity