Dell's ultra-premium ultra-wide OLED is down to $899.99, a high price that's nonetheless justified
The AW3423DWF is one of the best monitors I've ever tested.
The Alienware AW3423DWF is an outstanding 34-inch OLED ultra-wide that outperforms basically everything else in its category, except for other OLED models. I took a look at it for Digital Foundry last year, and it remains one of my top choices in 2023. Now, with three years of burn-in warranty as standard and a modest price reduction from $1079 to $899, it's well worth writing up in a US deals post for Rock Paper Shotgun!
So what makes this monitor so good? Looking at the core specs, it's not so obvious - we've seen 34-inch 3440x1440 monitors for years after all, even those with a 165Hz refresh rate. Instead, what sets this monitor apart is its Samsung QD-OLED panel, with its self-emissive pixels providing a bright and vivid HDR experience for gaming and films alike, near-instant pixel response times for great motion handling and the perfect blacks and infinite contrast that are only possible with OLED panels.
It's telling that OLED screens have taken over the premium TV and smartphone markets, and now the same transition is beginning to happen for PC monitors too. It's just hard to beat an OLED when it comes to so many of those traditional metrics, whether it's performance in fast-paced competitive games or suitability for content creation and consumption.
OLED screens just look great - and the QD-OLED of the AW3423DWF outperforms earlier W-OLED models by offering better colour reproduction while also offering more robust protection against burn-in. Its this latter characteristic that mean Dell offer a three-year warranty against permanent image retention on this screen, something we haven't seen on many earlier OLED models, particularly in the United States. This can even be extended to five years for a small fee - folks on Reddit report seeing prices for this as low as $60 if you ask a customer service representative on Dell's site.
I still wouldn't use this monitor for traditional work, whether that's spreadsheets or working in Photoshop, as having static elements on screen for a long amount of time can still lead to burn-in, the subpixel layout results in text fringing until Windows supports this layout with ClearType - and perhaps most critically, you'd not really make use of the benefits over a standard IPS panel that can be had for far cheaper. With that in mind though, for a monitor primarily used for gaming and watching videos, this is an awesome choice and probably the monitor I'd go for if I had to start from scratch.
Has anyone else used an OLED for PC gaming? Let me know in the comments below and stay tuned for more deals as we close out this week!