Dell Ultrasharp U3415W 34" Curved Monitor

[Ted Striker 338]

Thanks for the pics,  I am also thinking that adding 2 more 27" screens for a 3 screen surround setup might be an option.  Certainly an option that is about half the price.

 

Mark,

I have three old Dell 19" 1280 x 1024 monitors running in Nvidia surround sound giving me a 3840 x 1024 screen view. The added peripheral vision is fantastic and I couldn't go back to one 1280 x 1024 monitor. The downside is the bezels. To obtain a smooth continous image across all three monitors you need to use the bezel correction in the Nvidia software. The external view is great with this however there is always a button or guage behind a bezel that I want to access. For this reason I want to get a large high resolution monitor and am trying to decide between a 4k monitor and one of these 34" Dells. The 4k monitor would maintain the 3840 wide view I have now and double my current vertical view from 1024 to 2160. I would really like the extra visibility of the lower cockpit panel. I am concerned however whether my 4.5ghz 3770k and 780gtx could handle double the resolution and therefore am also considering the 34" Dell and following this thread.

 

I just wanted to jump in and provide you this feedback on my experience. Two more 27" screens would be an improvement over your single 27", however unless you are getting them really cheap I would recommend getting a large single screen because of the bezel issue, especially if your monitors have large bezels. Mine are 1/2" wide and I put the center monitor behind the side monitors to minimize the effect. I just realized that my monitors are the old standard screens and yours is probably a wide screen with a 1920 wide resolution. You really only need one extra monitor to get the 3840 wide resolution. You'd only have your panel interrupted with one bezel, unfortunately it would probably be right in your landing view. Just food for thought.

 

Is there anyone following this thread that has gone from a monitor with a 2160 vertical resolution to one of these new Dells with 1440 vertical resolution? I am curious if you are missing the extra depth of the panel view?

 

Ted   

[LittlePaulio 3]

 

 

Is there anyone following this thread that has gone from a monitor with a 2160 vertical resolution to one of these new Dells with 1440 vertical resolution? I am curious if you are missing the extra depth of the panel view?

 

Interesting question. I myself am considering a 32" Samsung with a 1440 vertical resolution (can't afford one of these Dell Ultra-wide bad boys!). My opinion would be that there are very few VC panels that would benefit from a 2160 vertical resolution except maybe aircraft from the likes of PMDG. I'm only speaking from my own experience with a 1080p monitor, but I have found that except for some of my A2A and newer Milviz aircraft, the VC panels just start to look slightly pixelated when zooming in close.

 

Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the developers (until maybe very recently) were designing VC panels with that type of graphical fidelity in mind. Again, I could be completely mistaken, and I don't own any PMDG products, or have I ever simmed on a monitor with a 2160 vertical resolution, but I would think 1440 pixels would more than suffice. 

[MarkW 1,491]

Mark,

I have three old Dell 19" 1280 x 1024 monitors running in Nvidia surround sound giving me a 3840 x 1024 screen view. The added peripheral vision is fantastic and I couldn't go back to one 1280 x 1024 monitor. The downside is the bezels. To obtain a smooth continous image across all three monitors you need to use the bezel correction in the Nvidia software. The external view is great with this however there is always a button or guage behind a bezel that I want to access. For this reason I want to get a large high resolution monitor and am trying to decide between a 4k monitor and one of these 34" Dells. The 4k monitor would maintain the 3840 wide view I have now and double my current vertical view from 1024 to 2160. I would really like the extra visibility of the lower cockpit panel. I am concerned however whether my 4.5ghz 3770k and 780gtx could handle double the resolution and therefore am also considering the 34" Dell and following this thread.

 

I just wanted to jump in and provide you this feedback on my experience. Two more 27" screens would be an improvement over your single 27", however unless you are getting them really cheap I would recommend getting a large single screen because of the bezel issue, especially if your monitors have large bezels. Mine are 1/2" wide and I put the center monitor behind the side monitors to minimize the effect. I just realized that my monitors are the old standard screens and yours is probably a wide screen with a 1920 wide resolution. You really only need one extra monitor to get the 3840 wide resolution. You'd only have your panel interrupted with one bezel, unfortunately it would probably be right in your landing view. Just food for thought.

 

Is there anyone following this thread that has gone from a monitor with a 2160 vertical resolution to one of these new Dells with 1440 vertical resolution? I am curious if you are missing the extra depth of the panel view?

 

Ted   

 

Thanks for the great info.

[LittlePaulio 3]

Is there anyone following this thread that has gone from a monitor with a 2160 vertical resolution to one of these new Dells with 1440 vertical resolution? I am curious if you are missing the extra depth of the panel view?

 

Just wanted to correct my previous post. After a quite a few reviews of payware aircraft from the likes of Carenado, A2AA, etc., I realised that they all seem to come with 4096x4096 textures for their VC panels- my bad.

I also realised that Ted was probably referring to the viewable area of 1440 monitors as opposed to pixel density. Which makes perfect sense. Apologies for both of my incorrect assumptions !

[Flic1 976]

I'm not sure if it's available on other monitors, but I was messing around with the Color Preset modes on my new 34" Dell Ultrawide and I found that the 'Multimedia' setting looks fantastic when using the sim!  I'm using P3D and this setting actually gives me a wonderfully dark nighttime and an equally nice daytime!  My UTX/GEX night lighting looks incredible and I don't have the washed out look that I was used to.  The clouds are also barely noticeable at night (need to test with various moon phases).  Did a night approach into LAX last night and it was stunning.  I have contrast set to 80 and brightness on 35 with this setting so try it out (if you have the monitor of course)!!

 

Eric

[Jim Young 2,356]

Hi Eric,

 

The brightness is too low for me so it did not work.  I will continue to use the default multimedia setting though and see if they are better than the standard or game settings.

 

Best regards,

[BAW9DV 2]

Hi,

 

Interesting to read this discussion, some of which I understand and some I don't!  :smile:

 

I am just now researching a new computer build based around the Intel i7-4790k CPU on a Windows 7 64-bit based system.   The problem is the choice of monitor.   I currently FS9 on a PC with Win XP Pro SP3 on a dual core cpu and my monitor is an IIyama 19" with FS9 running at a 4:3 screen ratio in 1280x1024x16 resolution.   Graphics card is a NVidia GeForce 8800GTS.  The new system will also have an NVidia card, possibly the Asus NVIDIA GTX 970 STRIX 4GB Graphics Card

 

My intentionis to carry on with the FS9 system as it is while the new system is built and I work on learning a new way to fly.   I'm going up to FSX Steam and also looking at XPlane.  That being the case, I'm now going to have to learn to fly FS in a different way after many years of simming.  I'm a 2D cockpit man and now I'm going to have to learn to fly using the predominently VC-type flight decks found in FSX.

 

At the age of 59, my eyesight is not what it used to be and I'm not looking forward to trying to read the instruments while having to zoom in and out here and there to do so.   So, my question as a first time moving into this new arena, is what type of monitor and what type of connection should I be looking at?

 

The late Mike Greenblatt of FSGS, a wonderful chap from whom I learnt a lot, always said to go for an odd size monitor (27, 29, 31 inch etc.) and make sure you run FS at the same resolution as your Windows desktop.    So is it worth going up to a large screen (34 to 40 inches - TV or LED type perhaps)?  What effect will that have?  I guess it could result in blocky pixels.   I have looked at 27 inch monitors which seem to be in the good price range here in the UK but might be too small.   There is also the 29 inch ultra-wide which most likely would not really help.  And what connection?  HDMI?  DVI?

 

I would value comments by someone here, taking into account what has been said, that might help me make the right choice.

 

Thank you,

 

Regards,

 

Lee

[sunnydaze 4]

Hi Guys.

I just got an e mail from NewEgg  that this monitor is on special for 48 hours only for $ 649.99. I just ordered mine!

Dennis

[Jim Young 2,356]

Hi,

 

Interesting to read this discussion, some of which I understand and some I don't!  :smile:

 

I am just now researching a new computer build based around the Intel i7-4790k CPU on a Windows 7 64-bit based system.   The problem is the choice of monitor.   I currently FS9 on a PC with Win XP Pro SP3 on a dual core cpu and my monitor is an IIyama 19" with FS9 running at a 4:3 screen ratio in 1280x1024x16 resolution.   Graphics card is a NVidia GeForce 8800GTS.  The new system will also have an NVidia card, possibly the Asus NVIDIA GTX 970 STRIX 4GB Graphics Card

My intentionis to carry on with the FS9 system as it is while the new system is built and I work on learning a new way to fly.   I'm going up to FSX Steam and also looking at XPlane.  That being the case, I'm now going to have to learn to fly FS in a different way after many years of simming.  I'm a 2D cockpit man and now I'm going to have to learn to fly using the predominently VC-type flight decks found in FSX.

 

At the age of 59, my eyesight is not what it used to be and I'm not looking forward to trying to read the instruments while having to zoom in and out here and there to do so.   So, my question as a first time moving into this new arena, is what type of monitor and what type of connection should I be looking at?

 

The late Mike Greenblatt of FSGS, a wonderful chap from whom I learnt a lot, always said to go for an odd size monitor (27, 29, 31 inch etc.) and make sure you run FS at the same resolution as your Windows desktop.    So is it worth going up to a large screen (34 to 40 inches - TV or LED type perhaps)?  What effect will that have?  I guess it could result in blocky pixels.   I have looked at 27 inch monitors which seem to be in the good price range here in the UK but might be too small.   There is also the 29 inch ultra-wide which most likely would not really help.  And what connection?  HDMI?  DVI?

 

I would value comments by someone here, taking into account what has been said, that might help me make the right choice.

 

Thank you,

 

Regards,

 

Lee

 

I won't be able to answer all of your questions.  You have a lot of what if's.  You have this topic with the discussion of the Dell 34 inch monitor.  Lots of people like it, it's cheap for a 34 inch IPS monitor (but not cheaper than a 4K HDTV), and there are some good reviews - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dell-u3415w-34-inch-ultra-wide-curved-monitor,4186.html

 

Know nothing about even/odd monitor sizes but I had the Dell 30" monitor before this Dell 34" monitor and it was a great monitor too. Never owned an old number monitor before.

 

There are a lot of discussions in this forum, good and bad about using 4K HDTV's or HDTV's as monitors.  It's like 34 inch monitors.  Some like them some do not.  You might want to read some of the posts here in this forum about using TV's as monitors.  Maybe ask more questions to those folks.  This topic is about one monitor, the dell u3415w 34 inch monitor.  Getting into discussions of TV's would not be polite to the OP.  The topic subject says it all!!  Best you start another topic relating to TV's and other things.

 

The following link is to a site that gives you some good information about what is best, HDMI, DisplayPort, or DVI - http://www.avadirect.com/blog/displayport-vs-hdmi-vs-dvi-vs-vga/.  This monitor uses HDMI 2.0. which changes the score in a lot of ball games.  I use the HDMI connection with my GTX 780.  Maybe when I upgrade to a GTX 980 ti, I will try the displayport connection.

 

Dennis (sunnydaze) has another good reason to buy this monitor...

 

For your other questions, I would simply drop them into a Google search box.  For instance, drop "is it worth going up to a large screen (34 to 40 inches - TV or LED type perhaps)?" into a search box or "what are the effects of going up to a large screen 34-40 inches".  You won't have blocky pixels with a large screen tv or monitor so don't ask that question.

 

For those who have bad eyesight like me, just hold down the Ctrl key with the + sign and your text will get larger and larger no matter how large your monitor or TV.  Hit the Ctrl and then the minus - key and the text will get smaller.  I also wear reading glasses when I'm in front of the computer; otherwise everything would be very blurry.

 

Best regards,

[Bob Scott 7,720]

I'm going to throw a bit of a countervailing opinion in here...I currently run a pair of Dell U3011 (16:10) IPS monitors, which I still hold dear.  I looked at the U3415W, and though I think it a good monitor, I personally couldn't give up the extra vertical real estate by going from the 16:10 30 inch monitors to the 34-inch 21:9 format.  The U3415W display area is about 25% (5 inches) wider, but also 20% (about 3 inches) shorter...and it adds about 25% to the pixel count, going from ~4MP to ~5MP per frame.  I find that I already have something of a challenge to get enough of the flight deck window view in the frame without cutting off parts of the lower panel...in that important respect, the wider but shorter display would present a problem for me.  Also, the curved screen is an issue for some of my other uses of the monitor--especially photo editing.  I also position my monitor so that the yoke center is aligned about 1/3 from the left edge of the screen to give a more accurate flight deck perspective with most of the panel off to the right side.  That simply does not work with any sort of curved screen.

 

They're both excellent monitors...but whether the 34" curved 21:9 is an improvement is going to depend heavily on how/and for what you use it.

 

Regards

[Samaritano 304]

Hi Guys.

I just got an e mail from NewEgg that this monitor is on special for 48 hours only for $ 649.99. I just ordered mine!

Dennis

48 hrs has not passed and I don't see it a that price. Do you have a link?

 

EDIT. I see it now. Promotion code plus a mail min rebate makes it $649. Thanks for the heads up.

[Slayer 190]

I'm going to throw a bit of a countervailing opinion in here...I currently run a pair of Dell U3011 (16:10) IPS monitors, which I still hold dear.  I looked at the U3415W, and though I think it a good monitor, I personally couldn't give up the extra vertical real estate by going from the 16:10 30 inch monitors to the 34-inch 21:9 format.  The U3415W display area is about 25% (5 inches) wider, but also 20% (about 3 inches) shorter...and it adds about 25% to the pixel count, going from ~4MP to ~5MP per frame.  I find that I already have something of a challenge to get enough of the flight deck window view in the frame without cutting off parts of the lower panel...in that important respect, the wider but shorter display would present a problem for me.  Also, the curved screen is an issue for some of my other uses of the monitor--especially photo editing.  I also position my monitor so that the yoke center is aligned about 1/3 from the left edge of the screen to give a more accurate flight deck perspective with most of the panel off to the right side.  That simply does not work with any sort of curved screen.

 

They're both excellent monitors...but whether the 34" curved 21:9 is an improvement is going to depend heavily on how/and for what you use it.

 

Regards

 

To be honest the curve is very slight and would not effect photo editing as there is not really any screen warping  built into this monitor, there is not distortion as far as I can see. In your case it's more of a sidegrade. Personally I got annoyed with multiple monitor bezels, performance loss and dealing with surround every driver upgrade. In your case you probably wouldn't like it because you will loose the taller VC view. I guess its a choice of a taller display or no bezels.

 

Compared to a 4k screen the resolution looks close BUT it is an exponential jump in rendering on your GPU.

 

3840 x 2160 is 8.2 M pixels

3440 x 1440 is 4.9 M pixels

 

as you can see it's a huge jump if your CPU or GPU isn't top of the line you will pay the price in FPS and OOM errors.

[Samaritano 304]

Just placed an order for one. $699 at newegg and they offer a $50 mail in rebate. Not bad.

I'll be moving from a Crossover 27" IPS 2560 X1440 to this. Its basically the same height but more real estate horizontally.

[Dash8Q4 4]

Anyone have any youtube videos of this display in action from an outside view? It would be awesome to watch.

[LittlePaulio 3]

 

 

Know nothing about even/odd monitor sizes but I had the Dell 30" monitor

Hey Jim, I'm just curious about the 30" Dell you had, which presumably had a 1440 vertical resolution- did you find you had to zoom in a lot in both Windows and FSX to read text or numbers properly. I ask because, I found out that I had astigmatism last year and now have to wear glasses all the time. I'm also in two minds about going for a 30" or 32", both with 2K resolution. There's not a huge selection in the 32" sector at the moment, with Samsung and BenQ selling the two most popular models. Both use the same panels and there have been numerous reports of colour banding with both models.

So I guess I was wondering if you or anyone else would recommend going for a quality 30" IPS monitor or one of the newer 32" models. I'll be upgrading from a 24" inch 16:9 btw. 

Oh, and sorry for hijacking the thread!