Curved monitors for gamers and office workers have been gaining popularity in the recent years and virtually all makers of displays have announced one or two curved LCDs. Being a very conservative company with a lineup tailored for professional and niche markets, Eizo was not among them until this week. On Thursday, the company finally revealed (via PC Watch) its first curved monitor — the FlexScan EV3895 — that not only has all the capabilities one comes to expect from a premium business and office-oriented display, but is also based on an IPS panel.
Like some of the best gaming monitors, curved ultrawide monitors with a 21:9 aspect ratio and wider bring a lot of advantages to professionals from many industries, including those who do creative and financial work, who need to see a lot at once. But the vast majority of curved ultrawide LCDs use VA panels that do not usually offer as good color accuracy as IPS panels do, which is why people with color critical workloads try to avoid them. Eizo’s customers work in industries where color depth and color accuracy are important, so the company has historically preferred IPS over other types of panels even for products aimed at offices.
The Eizo FlexScan EV3895 uses a 37.5-inch non-glossy IPS panel featuring a 3840×1600 resolution as well as a 24:10 aspect ratio that is presumably made by LG Display. The resolution of the monitor is a good fit for displaying Ultra-HD content filmed in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 or 2.39:1 that is used by many movies. In addition, these resolution and aspect ratio provide a good balance between width and height for productivity and financial applications.
Other characteristics of the FlexScan EV3895 are fairly typical. The monitor features 300 nits brightness, a 1000:1 contrast ratio, 178°/178° viewing angles, a 5 ms GtG response time, and a 60 Hz refresh rate. The LCD can display 16.77 million of colors and covers 100% of the sRGB as well as 94% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, so we are not talking about a professional-grade device here, but this is definitely an above average business and productivity monitor.
As far as connectivity is concerned, the LCD comes with one DisplayPort, two HDMI, and one USB Type-C input. The latter can deliver up to 85 W of power to the host, which is enough for most laptops (except higher-performance workstations like beefed up Apple’s MacBook Pro 16 and the likes).
Since many notebooks these days come without a wired Ethernet port and even lack USB Type-A connectors, the FlexScan EV3895 monitor has a built-in GbE as well as a quad-port USB 3.1 Type-A hub (with two USB 3.1 Type-B upstream ports). On the multimedia side of things, the LCD is equipped with two 1-W stereo speakers and a headphone output.
One of the key selling features of the Eizo FlexScan EV3895 is a built-in KVM function that allows the user to share the mouse and keyboard connected to the display with up to three PCs (so, PiP and PbP functionality is also supported). Each computer can be equipped with a special application that preserves display settings locally and not on the LCD itself.
Traditionally for Eizo’s monitors, the FlexScan EV3895 comes with a stand that can adjust height, tilt, and swivel. Alternatively, the stand can be switched for a VESA 100x100-compatible arm.
Eizo will start sales of the FlexScan EV3895 in Japan on October 16, 2020, for ¥209,000. The company says that the product will be available in other countries starting from November, but does not disclose MSRPs. Given the price in Japan, it may be reasonable to expect the product to be price at about $1,799 in the US, but this is a speculation at this point.
