Author: Adam Simmons

Date published: April 6th 2016



The BenQ XR3501 was the first monitor to offer the rather unconventional combination of steeply curved 35” VA panel, 144Hz refresh rate and 2560 x 1080 resolution. It was and still remains quite a controversial combination given the much higher pixel density offered by many displays now on the market. It was also criticised for its high price and lack of any sort of variable refresh rate technology. The Acer Z35 addressed some of these criticisms with the inclusion of Nvidia G-SYNC. It also added support for up to 200Hz, although that doesn’t come without a negative impact on image quality. The AOC C3583FQ combines this 35” VA panel with Adaptive-Sync (and hence support for AMD FreeSync), whilst also supporting up to 160Hz and coming in at a significantly lower price than the aforementioned competing models. We put this monitor through our usual set of tests to see how it all plays out in practice.





The monitor uses a 35” VA (Vertical Alignment) panel with support for a 160Hz refresh rate. A typical contrast ratio of 2000:1 is specified alongside a fairly steep curve to the screen of 2000R. True 8-bit colour is supported without dithering and a 4ms grey to grey response time is specified. This specified response time should, as always, be approached with caution. Some of the key ‘talking points’ of this monitor have been highlighted in blue below for your reading convenience.

Screen size: 35 inches

Panel type: AU Optronics M350DVR01.0 AMVA3 (Advanced Multi-Domain Vertical Alignment ‘Type 3’) LCD

Native resolution: 2560 x 1080

Typical maximum brightness: 300 cd/m²

Colour support: 16.7 million (8-bits per subpixel without dithering)

Response time (G2G): 4ms

Refresh rate: 160Hz (variable, with Adaptive-Sync)

Weight: 11.6kg

Contrast ratio: 2,000:1 (100m:1 Dynamic Contrast)

Viewing angle: 178º horizontal, 178º vertical

Power consumption: 60W typical

Backlight: WLED (White Light Emitting Diode)

Typical price as reviewed: £580

From the front you can see that the most striking aspect of the monitor is its physical presence; with a large panoramic 21:9 screen. You will also notice the fact that it is curved, an aspect which is perhaps easiest to show photographically from a top-down perspective as in the third image below. The bezels are reasonably slender with a glossy black plastic finish – ~19mm (0.75 inches) at the top and sides and ~23mm (0.91 inches). This includes a sliver of panel border – this is not a ‘dual-stage’ design, so the hard bezel actually covers virtually all of the panel border and this aspect therefore appears similar whether the monitor is on or off. The screen surface is fairly light matte anti-glare as explored later.





You may also notice the quite interesting stand base (above), which uses black plastic with a brushed texture underneath a layer of transparent glossy plastic varnish. This base is actually an integral part of the monitor and can’t simply be removed. It houses many of the monitor’s electronics and also the OSD (On Screen Display) controls, which face upwards to the right of centre. These are touch-sensitive and rather responsive. There is also a small power LED below and to the left of these buttons, on the silver-coloured strip. This glows a fairly dim and unobtrusive blue when the monitor is switched on and orange when the monitor stops receiving a signal from the computer. The video below runs through the functionality of this OSD menu system.





From the side the monitor appears quite rounded. You can see the side of the screen has a silver plastic surround, sandwiched between two layers of glossy black plastic (as used for the front and rear of the screen). You can also see the curvaceous stand neck from this angle. The screen itself is reasonably slender – ~28mm (1.10 inches) at thinnest point, bulking out a bit more in places. The stand only offers tilt (3º forwards, 15º backwards) with no further ergonomic flexibility – and as noted earlier is a permanent feature of the monitor and can’t simply be removed or replaced. The bottom of the screen clears the desk by 76.2mm (3.00 inches) with the top ~460mm (18.11 inches) above the desk surface. This means that the screen sits quite low to the desk and can’t be adjusted, which could be less than ideal depending on user height and desk height.







The rear of the screen is dominated by glossy black plastic, with a glossy chrome-coloured plastic used for the stand neck. There are 5W stereo speakers, rear facing with grills visible. These provided quite reasonable sound output with plenty of volume and a more bass-rich ‘punchiness’ than many integrated speakers. The clarity of treble and mid-tones wasn’t as good as it could be, though, with mild distortion even at low volumes. Certainly usable, but don’t expect these to replace a decent standalone speaker or headphone set if you’re interested in high-quality audio. There are of course no VESA holes, unsurprising given what has been said about the integrated stand design. The ports are rear-facing on the stand base either side of the stand neck; DVI-D, 2 HDMI 1.4 ports (with MHL), 2 DP 1.2a ports (supports VESA Adaptive-Sync), VGA, 3.5mm line-in, 3.5mm headphone jack and DC power input (external power brick).





The full capabilities of the monitor, including the full refresh rate at native resolution and the use of AMD FreeSync on a compatible GPU requires DisplayPort to be used. HDMI does not support FreeSync nor any higher than 2560 x 1080 @60Hz on this model and is there for compatibility with other devices such as games consoles. A VGA cable, HDMI cable, DP cable and 3.5mm audio cable is included in the box alongside power adaptor and cabling.





A fairly light matte anti-glare screen surface is used on the monitor. This offers superior clarity and vibrancy to some matte screen surfaces, but is not as light as the surface used on the 34” 3440 x 1440 models. Good glare-handling characteristics are maintained and the surface texture itself is relatively smooth, free from obvious graininess even when viewing light content.







The subpixel layout is RGB (Red, Green and Blue) strip, which is the default layout expected by modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Apple’s MacOS. This means that MacOS users don’t need to worry about text fringing issues from less common subpixel layouts and Windows users needn’t worry about adjusting ClearType settings. Windows users may still wish to run through the ClearType wizard to fine-tune according to preferences, though.





The monitor has a few ‘presets’, although none of these achieve something that can’t be achieved by manual tweaking in the OSD. There are various ‘Eco Mode’ settings, but these simply set the brightness to various predefined valued. There are also a range of ‘GameMode’ settings which you can cycle through by pressing the left arrow before entering the OSD. These are explored a bit in the video earlier in the review, they include; ‘FPS’, ‘RTS’, ‘Racing’, ‘Gamer1’ and ‘Gamer2’. They make various adjustments to the OSD, which could be achieved manually. They also lock off access to key settings – they all grey out the ‘Color Setup’ menu, but bizarrely whatever settings you’re using here before activating the ‘GameMode’ are taken into account anyway and will therefore have a significant impact on the image. The ‘FPS’, ‘RTS’ and ‘Racing’ presets also lock off the ‘Luminance’ menu and force you to use full brightness, which is uncomfortable to say the least.

More useful are manual adjustments, for which there are a range of settings that can be adjusted according to user taste such as ‘Gamma’ and ‘Color Temp.’ In the table below we test a range of settings on the monitor, provide some readings (gamma and white point) using a DataColor Spyder5ELITE colorimeter and also share our general observations on the image. The monitor was kept in its ‘Plug and Play’ state, without additional drivers and ICC profiles loaded, connected to a Windows 10 system. DP 1.2 was used to connect it to a Club3D Radeon R9 290 royalAce FreeSync-compatible GPU, with the monitor running for over 2 hours before readings were taken. We also briefly tested using an Nvidia GPU and noted similar image characteristics.

Unless otherwise stated, assume that settings were left at default with the exception of 160Hz being used. The refresh rate did not noticeably or quantifiably affect the static image quality of the monitor. Also note that if you manually adjust the colour channels by setting ‘Color Temp.’ to ‘User’ and making changes, these will not be reset even if you perform a factory reset of the monitor. The neutral position for each colour channel is ‘50’ – so for the purposes of the table below, assume ‘50’ was used for each colour channel when testing the ‘User’ setting.

Out of the box, the monitor was very bright but quite well balanced overall. Shades appeared rich and varied overall, with the viewing angle restrictions of the VA panel causing a fair bit of saturation loss towards the edges and bottom of the screen. Gamma measured centrally was 2.3 (below), with a little bit of a droop in the curve in places. This made some shades appear just slightly deeper than they should centrally but also counteracted some of the saturation loss peripherally as well. Overall things appeared well-balanced, as mentioned earlier, so given the intended uses for the monitor the setup was quite good really.



Gamma test settings The default ‘Warm’ preset provided an image that was only slightly warm, whereas ‘Normal’ provided an excessive blue tint that is far from normal. There is no ‘Low Blue Light’ (LBL) or equivalent setting on the monitor, so we improvised with some ‘Relaxing evening viewing’ settings that are mentioned in the table and explored a bit later. These essentially act as an LBL setting by doing what many settings of that nature do anyway – reducing the strength of the blue colour channel and therefore lowering the white point and cutting out blue light emission from the screen.



Test Settings For our ‘Test Settings’ we made manual adjustments to the colour channels (with ‘Color Temp.’ set to ‘User’) and significantly reduced brightness. We also nudged the refresh rate up to 160Hz and set ‘Overdrive’ to ‘Medium’ – these changes had no impact on the static image quality but are included just for reference. Any setting not mentioned below was left at default.



Brightness= 38 (according to preferences and lighting) Overdrive= Medium Color Temp= User R= 45 G= 45 B= 50 Refresh rate= 160Hz

Relaxing evening viewing As mentioned earlier we created a setting for ‘Relaxing evening viewing’ with a significantly less intense blue colour channel and warmer look to the image. For the sake of simplicity, the reduction to the blue colour channel was the only change we made from the ‘Test Settings’, as it made it easier to switch between the two. This is just a suggestion and users might like to experiment with their own alternative settings for relaxing evening viewing. We used these settings for our own viewing pleasure later in the evening but not for any of our testing.





Brightness= 38 (according to preferences and lighting) Brightness= 38 (according to preferences and lighting) Overdrive= Medium Color Temp= User R= 45 G= 45 B= 28 Refresh rate= 160Hz



Contrast and brightness Contrast ratios We used a Konica Minolta CS-200 luminance meter to measure the luminance of white and black using a range of monitor settings, from which static contrast ratios were calculated. The data is shown in the table below, with blue highlights indicating the results for our ‘Test Settings’ and ‘Relaxing evening viewing’ settings. Black highlights indicate the highest white luminance, lowest black luminance and highest contrast ratio recorded. Assume any setting not mentioned here was left at default, with the exceptions already covered in the calibration section. Monitor Settings White luminance (cd/m²) Black luminance (cd/m²) Contrast ratio (x:1) 100% brightness 360 0.17 2118 80% brightness 299 0.14 2136 60% brightness 233 0.11 2118 40% brightness 170 0.08 2125 20% brightness 110 0.05 2200 0% brightness 46 0.02 2300 Factory defaults (90% brightness) 282 0.13 2169 Gamma2 332 0.15 221 Gamma3 321 0.16 2006 Color Temp. Normal 282 0.17 1659 Color Temp. sRGB 255 0.21 1214 Color Temp. User 315 0.15 2194 Test Settings 160 0.08 2000 Relaxing evening viewing 154 0.08 1925

The average static contrast with brightness only adjusted was 2176:1, which is comfortably within ‘VA only’ territory (for LCDs). Although it’s quite close to the 2000:1 specified, so you can’t really grumble, the measured contrast on our Z35 sample (using the same panel) exceeded this by some margin. It’s possibly something to do with variability between individual panels or something else in the monitor itself, but we still consider the contrast on the C3583Q to be quite strong. Interestingly the contrast was not really elevated by using the ‘User’ setting and having all channels in their neutral ‘50’ position, but by the same token it didn’t drop much when the blue channel was altered. It remained at a strong 1925:1 for our ‘Relaxing evening viewing’ settings where the blue channel was dropped significantly. For the minor adjustments made to the other colour channels, as per our ‘Test Settings’, contrast was measured at 2000:1. The highest white luminance recorded on the table was 360 cd/m² and the lowest white luminance was 46 cd/m², providing a strong 314 cd/m² luminance adjustment range with plenty of useful values.

The monitor includes a Dynamic Contrast setting called ‘DCR’ (Dynamic Contrast Ratio), which allows the backlight to brighten or dim according to the overall levels of light or dark on the screen. The backlight is, as usual, controlled as a single unit so the monitor can’t account for intricate mixtures of bright and dark with this setting. An interesting (and useful) quirk to this setting is that the brightness level you set before enabling the setting has an influence on how bright the monitor will go with the ‘DCR’ mode active. The brightness control is greyed out once the setting is active, so you have to make this change prior to activating the mode. The backlight in this mode changes its intensity at a moderate pace, dimming quite effectively for predominantly dark content. It also becomes relatively bright for lighter content, but again this can be restricted by choosing a lower brightness setting before activation. Although we are not fans of Dynamic Contrast at the best of times, this is quite a good implementation.





PWM (Pulse Width Modulation)

The monitor uses DC (Direct Current) to dim the backlight and does not use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) at any brightness setting. The backlight is therefore classed as ‘flicker-free’, as advertised, which will please users sensitive to flickering or the effects of PWM.





Luminance uniformity