VA panel for office work?

[JorenBus]

Hi,

 

I'm currently in the market for a new monitor mainly for productivity (home office) and I would like to get a 34" ultrawide monitor. High refresh rate is not necessarily a must have, but since it's only a small increase in price, I might as well get a 144 of 165 Hz monitor. I have set my eyes on the AOC AOC CU34G2X, which is a 165Hz VA panel.

I'm currently using an IPS screen, so VA monitors are completely new to me. According to my research the contrast of VA panels is generally much better than IPS, but comes with black smearing.

VA seems the better way to go since curved IPS screens are quite expensive and with this size I'd think that a curved display is much nicer than a completely flat one.

Since I will mainly use the monitor for productivity (think Word, Excel, Teams, web browsing,...) I was wondering whether or not this black smearing is an issue or not.

 

Thanks!

[Oshino Shinobu]

The smeering/ghosting on VA is for fast moving images, and even then you often need to be looking for it to really notice it. Unless you're working on some seriously hardcore, fast moving excel worksheets, you'll be absolutely fine.

[Light-Yagami]

For work that does not require color accuracy you need a monitor that has response time as fast as its refresh rate so that it doesn't smear the image, you need high resolution and you need something that doesn't emit a ton of blue light. 

 

With that in mind, go watch some of Hardware Unboxed monitor reviews. That's all I can say. I prefer smaller displays with higher resolution.

[JorenBus]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

The smeering/ghosting on VA is for fast moving images, and even then you often need to be looking for it to really notice it. Unless you're working on some seriously hardcore, fast moving excel worksheets, you'll be absolutely fine.

Oh alright that's good news. Will this smearing occur when I'm for example scrolling on a website in dark mode and white text? If so, how bad will that be?

[PDifolco]

Curved screens aren't ideal for work, mine serves for gaming mostly but for work I'd rather get a flat one

VA is fine, Excel won't smear on screen lol

[JorenBus]

2 minutes ago, Light-Yagami said:

For work that does not require color accuracy you need a monitor that has response time as fast as its refresh rate so that it doesn't smear the image, you need high resolution and you need something that doesn't emit a ton of blue light. 

 

With that in mind, go watch some of Hardware Unboxed monitor reviews. That's all I can say. I prefer smaller displays with higher resolution.

Oh forgot to mention that the monitor is 1440p, so I think I'm good there. Do you mean that I have to get 144 fps in order to fully utilize the monitor? I'm guessing that in Windows this won't be a problem.

I have actually already watched the Hardware Unboxed review of this monitor. He was quite positive but did not really mention the smearing.

[JorenBus]

2 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Curved screens aren't ideal for work, mine serves for gaming mostly but for work I'd rather get a flat one

VA is fine, Excel won't smear on screen lol

Can you elaborate why curved isn't ideal for work?

[PDifolco]

2 minutes ago, JorenBus said:

Can you elaborate why curved isn't ideal for work?

Because it's numbers and words and it's a bit weird when they don't line up...

Especially for big Excel spreadsheets

[saintlouisbagels]

7 minutes ago, JorenBus said:

Can you elaborate why curved isn't ideal for work?

3 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Because it's numbers and words and it's a bit weird when they don't line up...

Especially for big Excel spreadsheets

Yeah I agree with @PDifolco

I use to have a curve monitor and it drove me crazy to see curved lines. It was especially weird when I was working in Lightroom.

[Oshino Shinobu]

14 minutes ago, JorenBus said:

Oh alright that's good news. Will this smearing occur when I'm for example scrolling on a website in dark mode and white text? If so, how bad will that be?

You won't see it. It's something you really have to look for when playing fast paced games. You're not going to notice anything for web browsing or office work.

 

Though yeah, reiterating what others have said, curved isn't great for office use. In particular excel where there are consistent straight, horizontal lines. If you're sitting in the perfect position it will be fine, but if you sit back in your chair or shift position, all those lines will become curved due to the angle you're looking at them from.

[Light-Yagami]

34 minutes ago, JorenBus said:

Can you elaborate why curved isn't ideal for work?

I've worked on a curved monitor. 1800R is pretty much the most i'd go for.. and even that is quite a lot. better two flat 16:9 screens than 1 bigger massively curved screen.

[e22big]

9 hours ago, JorenBus said:

Oh alright that's good news. Will this smearing occur when I'm for example scrolling on a website in dark mode and white text? If so, how bad will that be?

It can absolutely happened. VA main weakenss isn't the speed per se, it's the speed between dark colour transition and scrolling white texts in dark mode or scrolling black icon is one area where that can happen more offen than not. It can be mitigated somewhat buy having a better overdrive setting but this tends to be a lot worse in a more budget option. 

 

But it's generally not too bad, you'll learn to ignore it fairly quickly and it does come with a benefit of not having the IPS glow (which make colour pop out a lot more, with IPS looks like you're watching colour through somethin grey filter in comparison sometime) 

 

What you should be aware though is that some of the more budget VA may have speed issue even in lighter colour, this mean you can see smearing or ghosting outside of dark mode as well, and that can be a lot more notiecable.

[Andrewtst]

For productivity it is OK. Curved won't make you see line weird or text weird for aspect ratio 21:9 and above. Unless the screen is very bad quality, normally it won't impact. Current curved screen in market is not curved until it impact to the wording, line or even image. Off course I always seat straight towards monitor screen and this is the correct seating also. If you are a person love to put monitor on side or never seat straight, you should be more concern on another issue - viewing angle. Viewing angle in VA is bad and the screen will washout if you didn't view straight on it. 

 

For excel, such wider screen is freaking awesome as it reduce scrolling left to right. 

 

As for the black smearing is not an issue but if only the VA panel is not good quality then during scrolling the text will like dissappear if white font in black or dark background. I not sure how serious this AOC one, you probably can check from review or if possible check yourself from physical unit. For high quality VA panel, this issue is some how never exist or very minimal but it ain't cheap and similar price as high quality IPS.