GM34-CWQA ARGB

Will be updating this review in a few months, positive or negative.Positives- INNOCOOL / CM was great to deal with. I had an issue with my order and they stayed in contact with me the whole time until it was resolved.- Amazon CS created the mess in the first place, promising that XYZ was going to happen multiple steps along the way. They were wrong every time, again luckily the 3rd party stepped in and took care of it.- Display - It looks great! i'd compare getting a "true" HDR10 display coming from SDR alienware UW like DVD > BluRay.- HDR - HDR10 movies are incredible, HDR native games are incredible, Auto-HDR is pretty cool and W11 native hdr is kind of annoying and inconsistent. Not CM's fault though. (tip win/alt/b = turn on and off HDR)- Price - I think the price is perfect and even a bit lower than it should be for the quality of the display. I have 0 dead pixels, and the refresh testing came out great.- Color Calibration - This monitor comes with color calibration straight out of the box, included is a print out of the results too. Great touch IMO.Negatives- This monitor is getting a firmware update in early/mid November. Via a CM rep on reddit... my 5 star rating is under the assumption that the below will be fixed.- You currently can not enable local dimming & async. Refer to the above on it though, I'm not too worried.

First, the good. The monitor is bright. It will give you a true HDR experience only really surpassed by an OLED (which personally I'd never want to use as a monitor due to eventual burn in). The problems start when you start doing non-HDR content while in HDR mode. Which you wouldn't think would be a problem till you realize basically all your computer software is SDR. Not too many games, although more and more are, support it and most desktop software will only use SDR. SDR content is very washed out. Seems to be a saturation or gamma issue as you can mostly compensate by turning down the Black Adjustment setting, but that starts to dim the high end of the brightness scale fairly noticeably. If that was all, I could make due with enough calibration and other tweaking.However there are two problems I just can't ignore. First, half the time when setting my Refresh Rate to 160 Hz the monitor and my other two monitors just shut off and never recover. I have to hard restart my computer by holding the power button. Then like 50% it'll come back up at 60 Hz or at 160 Hz. And it'll just randomly boot in 60 Hz after having been set to 160 Hz. I also had one time where the Nvidia Control Panel could not detect Adaptive Sync Support. I didn't have these problems when just using 120 Hz or 144 Hz.The final nail in the coffin was the local dimming behavior on SDR content. It was almost like the local dimming logic inverted on SDR content. Watch and HDR video and it is near perfect, but just browsing the web and go on a site with Dark Mode and you see the issue right away. The easiest way to test is to show an image with like a 70% gray. If you mouse over the image you can see as a local dimming zone dims as the mouse passes through it. That's not how that works. The mouse is pure white, you should instead see a halo as the dimming zone is brighter than all the ones around it due to the mouse cursor. That is just unacceptable and the only way to "fix" it is disabling local dimming which ruins your blacks, which is kind of the point with HDR. Ultimately it is this last point that forced my hand to return the monitor.4/5 for Gaming, only loses the 5th start due to the issue with 160 Hz1/5 for Picture quality, would be 0 if I could, for the issues with SDR (for the desaturation and local dimming issue)5/5 for Brightness, because it really does get BRIGHTThe other

The display itself is gorgeous. DisplayCal is showing me high-90s for P3 and Adobe RGB coverage (and way, way above those for volume). Used as an SDR monitor with the backlight off, no complaints.BUT ... there are a number of issues that are hopefully addressable in firmware.* Enabling local dimming with SDR mode is possible, but looks horrible on the desktop and in static images. Mid-tones are bright but with low contrast. Brights are so bright they can be eye-searing, and can seemingly clip whites. I'd been hoping for it basically just to boost contrast, with real blacks when using SDR with dimming, but right now, that's a no-go. The same combo does, however, seem to look much better while gaming, especially in a game with a lot of neon lights and high contrast, like Stray. UPDATE: Taking contrast way down helps this considerably. With contrast down to about 20 (from a default of 70) and local dimming set to high, SDR content looks similar to how it does with dimming off and contrast on 70, only blacks are way deeper (which is a good thing).* Enabling HDR disables Adaptive Sync. You can only get dimming and adaptive sync enabled if you enable dimming first, because it greys out the sync control. And sometimes weird things happen -- like if you have HDR disabled in the monitor and enable sync, the screen blanks out for a second, then Windows 11 comes back with HDR enabled (while it's still disabled in the monitor itself), looking horrible because dimming is still disabled. That's at least easily fixed by disabling hdr in windows from there.* The KVM and input select are both handy, but don't have an option to be tied together (see how they work on Gigabyte monitors -- it's great). That doesn't work very well if you have multiple devices plugged in and one goes to sleep. You try to switch from one device (say, a PC), to a second device (say, a Macbook), and the Macbook isn't outputting a signal, so it switches back to the PC. If you think to switch the KVM FIRST to the macbook, you can start hitting the spacebar or wiggle the mouse to get the Macbook to wake up. And if there's no PC awake on the first input but the KVM is still set to the PC? You can't get into the OSD without the computer first finding a signal and showing SOMETHING, so you can't switch the KVM ...* HDR looks very good. SDR content and the UI with HDR enabled in Windows is ... OK. That's more about Windows than the monitor. But the monitor has a noticeable green tint in the HDR setting, with no color control. Grey uniformity is noticeably uneven and there's some flickering when HDR and dimming are enabled, too, which makes that tough to leave on all the time.I'm looking forward to a firmware update a CM rep has promised on reddit, to allow adaptive sync to work with HDR, and to enable color control in HDR. Then I can use SDR mode with dimming off most of the time, and switch selectively into HDR mode for HDR content. I'd love to be able to just leave HDR enabled all the time (like, say, on my macbook's built-in screen, or like works well on OLED screens) but that doesn't seem to be in the cards unless MAYBE CM reworks the dimming algorithm to be less brutal in SDR mode.