LG 34UC97 34-Inch Ultra-Wide Curved Monitor Review

OSD Setup And Calibration Of The LG 34UC97

OSD Tour

All monitor functions are accessed with a tiny joystick that’s out of sight beneath the bottom edge of the bezel. You can turn on a soft LED to help you find it, but it’s hard to see when the room lights are on. Just reach beneath the LG logo and you can operate it by feel.

Pulling the stick down brings up a quick-access menu. One more pull shuts off the power. Pushing up opens the audio settings and clicking right accesses the PBP options. Pressing the stick cancels the menu or selects options. A left-click reveals the full OSD.

Easy Control offers basic picture and volume adjustments. To access the commands, click the joystick right once, then up and down to choose your options. The aspect ratio settings are described below.

We did all of our testing and viewing on the Wide setting, which scales every source to 3440x1440 regardless of input resolution. Original also scales, but preserves the signal’s native aspect ratio. The Cinema modes scale 1080p content to eliminate the black bars, which is handy for watching Blu-rays. If you choose Cinema 2, it leaves room for the subtitle bar at the bottom of the image. Finally, 1:1 displays the input signal without scaling, meaning it's windowed or shown with pillar-bars left and right.

The Function menu contains the MaxxAudio options (more detail below), a Reader Mode for optimizing the image for reading news or comics, the Picture modes and the Smart Energy Saving option. The last one is turned on by default, causing visible image pumping as content changes and skewing the otherwise decent gamma. There’s more info about that on page five.

We don’t often see monitors with audio tone controls or simulated surround sound. Since LG includes seven-watt speakers in the 34UC97, it also decided to up the quality a notch with MaxxAudio. We didn’t hear much improvement from the Bass and Treble sliders, but the Dialog control does help to center voices when watching movies. And the 3D option broadens the soundstage a bit.

Here are the four picture modes. The monitor comes set to Custom and if you don’t calibrate, that's the best option. It’s also the best choice if you do make adjustments because you have access to the gamma, white balance and color management features.

With its extra width, the 34UC97 makes great use of picture-by-picture. You can view two sources at once, decide which one to listen to, swap them and adjust their aspect ratios.

The next menu is called Screen. It offers the rest of the image adjustments. Of particular note is the Black Level selector, set to High by default. You'd think that changing it to Low would crush shadow detail, but it doesn’t. In fact, to see the greatest contrast, you need to use the Low setting. It's only a factor over an HDMI connection; it has no effect on DisplayPort signals. Response time increases the pixel clock to effectively reduce motion blur.

In the Color sub-menu are the rest of the calibration controls. Gamma offers three presets, of which 1 is the best. Color Temp also has three presets, plus a user-adjustable Custom mode. Even though the RGB sliders start in the center, raising them past 50 causes clipping. It’s best to only reduce them when adjusting the white point.

LG includes a color management system in the 34UC97. It works well for tweaking the secondary colors’ hue, and the saturation sliders actually change luminance. We were able to realize small gains with it, though color accuracy is already pretty good at the default settings.

The final menu has a few ergonomic settings, including language, power LED (on/off), automatic standby (shuts down power when no signal is present) and an OSD lockout. You can also change the DisplayPort version from 1.1 to 1.2. But since the 34UC97 maxes at 60Hz, it won’t make any difference in performance. If you have an older graphics board, leave it on 1.1.

Lastly, you can return all OSD settings to their factory defaults. That includes the Smart Energy Saver, so don’t forget to turn that back off after resetting.

Calibration

The 34UC97 ships with a factory calibration that's pretty close to the mark. However, we found room for improvement in our tests. As already stated, you must turn off the Smart Energy Saving feature. We’ll show you on pages five and six how it affects the gamma and color gamut test results. We left Gamma on preset 1 after the other options caused high-level clipping and an inaccurate grayscale. After adjusting the white balance, we tweaked a few colors in the CMS. The hue controls work as expected, but the saturation sliders actually adjust luminance. It wasn’t a problem though, and we achieved good results overall.