LG 34UM95 34-Inch Ultra-Wide QHD Monitor Review

OSD Setup And Calibration Of The LG 34UM95

OSD Tour

To open the main OSD, click the joystick towards you, then left.

The Easy Control menu has the Brightness and Contrast sliders, along with Volume (for the headphones), input selector, and aspect ratio options. Those options are:

• Wide: fills the screen regardless of input resolution
• Original: matches the incoming aspect ratio and fills the screen from top to bottom
• Cinema 1: zooms out the black bars in Cinemascope movies
• Cinema 2: does the same, but leaves room for subtitles
• 1:1: direct pixel-mapping

Super Energy Saving doesn’t work quite the way you’d expect. At the Low setting, it limits brightness by about 20 percent, which makes sense. At the High setting, it automatically maxes the backlight and resets the Contrast control to 70. In some cases, that'll make the 34UM95 brighter. I dropped it to 56 during my calibration pass, so when I selected High, it actually did increase output.

Calibration is an automatic routine that requires an application bundled with the monitor. You also need a specific instrument only available from LG though, so weren't able to try it. Our OSD calibration proved to be very precise, so we’re not sure how much better the factory one could be.

There are four picture modes:

Custom is the default mode and the only one that makes all adjustments available. Photo is a good choice if you don’t calibrate, but it only leaves you with Brightness control. It does have the advantage of being the monitor’s brightest mode. Cinema and Game alter the grayscale, color, and gamma into the realm of personal preference rather than strict accuracy.

Picture-by-Picture functions are extensive, as they should be for any ultra-wide screen. First, choose which two inputs to use. Then select the one to output audio. You can swap them of course, and change their aspect ratios to Original (preserving the correct shape) or Full (which stretches the image vertically to fill the PBP window).

The Sharpness control works best on its default setting of 5. Reduce it and the image softens. Increase it and edge enhancement results.

Black Level does indeed reduce the black level and alters gamma slightly. Either High or Low gives you decent gamma and contrast, but Low provides the best image quality in my opinion.

Response Time alters the pixel timing to reduce motion blur. It works well. However, as we've seen on other monitors, it sometimes increases ghosting artifacts.

Here are the rest of the calibration controls. There are three gamma presets, but only the first one comes close to 2.2. Color Temp offers Warm, Medium, and Cool presets plus a Custom mode. The RGB sliders begin at the center of their ranges, which means you can maintain contrast and light output as you adjust them.

Six Color takes you to the CMS shown below, and Reset returns all Color settings to their factory defaults.

We’re always excited to see a CMS. Unfortunately, this one doesn’t provide any color luminance controls. The saturation sliders have very little effect, but the hue adjustments work well. We were able to correct errors in the magenta secondary and the fix worked at all saturation levels on our CIE chart. Check out page seven for more details.

The Settings menu includes 12 languages for the OSD. By default, the Power LED is turned off, making it tough to find the joystick controller. We turned it on and were happy to see the light isn't searing blue. Instead, it's a nice, soft, white color.

Auto Standby turns the 34UM95 off after an unspecified period of inactivity.

Thanks to the high pixel count, you’ll need to enable DisplayPort 1.2 if you want to operate at 60 Hz. Version 1.1 limits you to 30 Hz.

OSD Lock grays out all adjustments except Brightness, Contrast, Volume, and Input.

The one thing missing is an OSD timeout feature. You have to move quickly because the menu disappears after only 20 seconds if you don’t do anything.

Finally, you can reset the entire OSD to its default state.

LG 34UM95 Calibration

I achieved excellent results using the Custom color temp mode and the Hue controls in the CMS. To dial in 100-percent brightness, I reduced the Contrast control from 70 to 56. The corresponding drop in light output forced me to max the Brightness control to compensate just so I could just reach 200 cd/m².

After calibrating grayscale, I settled on Gamma 1 and Black Level Low as the options that best maintained the monitor’s native contrast. There is one quirk that you'll discover when you try to take black level readings. Sending a zero-percent signal to the 34UM95 shuts down the backlight completely after a few seconds. Obviously, that yields a false reading or none at all. There’s no way to disable the feature, but it’s not a problem in normal use.

Color measurements taken after the grayscale calibration show a slight hue error in magenta, which I easily fixed using the CMS. There are no luminance controls there and the saturation sliders don’t work, but I still wound up with great color when I was done.