At A Glance: Asus ProArt PA34VC Professional Curved Monitor Review

As its name suggests, Asus’s ProArt PA34VC Professional Curved display was primarily designed as a solution for professional image editors and designers. But the company went a bit further and also equipped it with several gaming-oriented features that make it a true jack-of-all-trades.

Design

This display uses an ultra-wide IPS panel with a resolution of 3440×1440. The panel has a curvature of 1900R and measures 34-inches diagonally. In addition to the immersive allusion created by the curved panel, gamers will also appreciate the panel’s 100Hz refresh rate and its support for AMD’s FreeSync technology. It’s also worth noting that this display features two USB Type-C ports, one of which can be used as a video input and as a charging port for supported devices.

Asus ships its ProArt PA34VC displays pre-calibrated, and it supports a 14-bit color look-up table that makes it easy to save custom color profiles and restore the factory calibrated settings if you alter the settings. According to Asus’s specs, the display should be capable of replicating 100 percent of the sRGB color spectrum.

Our sister site, PCMag, tested the color accuracy of the ProArt PA34VC. These tests resulted in the ProArt falling just short of its goal with just 99.9 percent of the sRGB color space being displayed. This makes the display suitable for high-end image editing. It lacks support for the full Adobe RGB color gamut, however, which places it a few steps behind many competing displays that are able to replicate this larger color space accurately.

Conclusion

Asus’s ProArt PA34VC display is a rather versatile solution for those that want a monitor for both work and play that sells for $999.00. But designing a display to meet both sets of criteria appears to have detracted somewhat from the monitor’s primary role as a business solution. Similarly priced displays such as Dell’s UltraSharp U3219Q offers superior color accuracy and would be a better option if your only concern is professional image editing. Acer’s Nitro XV3 XV273K offers tougher competition against Asus’s ProArt PA34VC, as it features a higher resolution, faster refresh rate, lower price and higher color accuracy. Acer’s Nitro XV3 XV273K uses a flat 27-inch panel, and it has a notable light bleeding issue, but its feature set and price make it a strong alternative to the Asus ProArt PA34VC.

All things considered, I’d still recommend the Asus ProArt PA34VC for those that want to use one display for both work and gaming, but if you just want to do one of the two you should think about purchasing a different monitor.

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