MSI MEG 342C QD-OLED Review
Conclusion
Conclusion
As we’ve said, we don’t really do endless graphs of colour spectrums and accuracy here at OC3D. However, let’s bang through a few numbers before we get down to our actual thoughts. The MSI MEG OLED 342C QD is fully VESA DisplayHDR 400 certified. The natural inclination for OLED panels to have true blacks only emphasises this. It has a peak brightness of 1000 nits, with an average of 250 nits. It has 99.3% DCI-P3 colour accuracy and 97.8% Adobe.
With 0.03 ms Grey-to-Grey response time and a 175 Hz refresh rate, it’s blisteringly fast. An anti-reflective coating, as you saw from our photos, and an anti-blue light filter ensure your eyes aren’t strained at all during those marathon sessions. Lastly, for those of you who fear blurry gaming, the MEG 342C QD is VESA ClearMR 9000 certified too. This is a test that determines how few of the pixels on screen are blurry rather than clear, and thus is a measure of image clarity and fidelity. Which the MSI has in spades.
All of which technical jargon can simply be summed up by how eye-poppingly gorgeous the MSI MEG OLED panel is to game on. It’s spectacular. We’re used to OLED gaming on our consoles, and the quality it brings to our movies and things, but to have it allied to the outstanding visuals a high-end PC can produce is something truly special.
On this display there is no smearing, no tearing, no fringing or any of the horrible artefacts you can get from lesser display options. We understand the MSI is incredibly expensive, but it backs up that price point with jaw-dropping visuals. If you’re a numbers fiend you might think HDR400 isn’t all that, just remember that this OLED screen is DisplayHDR True Black 400. That’s a totally different beast to LCD DisplayHDR 400. Blacks are flawless. Bright colours pop. It’s the kind of visual treat you’ll be dragging strangers in off the street to witness.
Burn In?
Of course we can’t talk about OLED displays without discussing burn-in. Recent advances in OLED technology has greatly assuaged this fear. Static objects are now detected and dimmed quickly to reduce their burn in threat. The pixels themselves are shifted at regular intervals to prevent pixel aging.
Additionally the panel itself will refresh itself, or force you to, every 12 hours to help prolong the life span. On a television this is important, but on a monitor where the Windows taskbar is nearly permanently visible it is even more important. We’d certainly auto-hide our Windows taskbar if we owned this panel. At this price we don’t want to take any chances. We think that the horror stories of early gen OLEDs are significantly a thing of the past, but not wholly. Just treat it carefully, game more than you stare at Excel so it has varied content, and you should be fine.
About the only negatives we can find are one of cost, and a strange box-ticking exercise. Obviously cost is entirely relative. Given how much a standard ultra-wide panel is, the fact that this MSI MEG OLED one is around that ball park shows how, relatively, affordable it actually is. However, we’re not going to pretend that £1300 isn’t a massive chunk of change to put down on a display. But you’re getting a lot of display for that investment. Why pay that for a regular LCD panel when you can have this OLED glorious one? The genuine ‘huh’ is the lightbar beneath the screen. It’s not big enough to be useful, but not small enough to not be distracting. It feels like marketing decided it had to have an RGB element and that’s what the designers came up with. Utterly pointless.
Final Thoughts
The MSI MEG OLED 342C QD monitor combines fantastic looks when off, with gorgeous image quality when on. You simply have to see it in action. Why spend all that money on a beefy graphics card and feed it through a substandard monitor, when you can make it shine brightly through something as wonderful as this?
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