Last year I set-up two dual 34 inch 1440p monitors on my desk for ultimate productivity. For a while it was great, but soon after it became obvious that two ultra wide monitors are not super ergonomic as they are just so damn wide, making me almost spin in my chair. And the bezel in the middle did not help the situation. Now we are checking out a possible replacement for that set-up by increasing the surface area even more but in a different way. In this video we will be checking out PrismPlus X490 Pro which is a 49 inch 1440p, high refresh rate monitor. Let’s see how it performs!
As I mentioned before it is a 49 inch 1440p monitor with 120Hz refresh rate and 1800R screen curvature. It is a VA panel and it supports AMD FreeSync, as well as being NVIDIA G-Sync compatible. The panel is rated for maximum brightness of 350 nits and Prism+ claims it has 140% sRGB colour space coverage. We will test that in a moment.
In the box we find a monitor stand, power cable, two display port cables, screws for the stand, as well as screws for the vesa mount. There is also a remote control and manual. As this is a more premium monitor from Prism+, it supports tilt, swivel and height adjustment which is a nice touch.
The monitor itself has two HDMI 2.0 ports, 2 Display 1.4 ports, audio output as well as a USB port.
This unit also has two built-in 3W speakers but I would strongly recommend getting a cheap set of speakers as an immediate upgrade. I actually use this set of speakers from Creative that connect via 3.5mm cable to the monitor for sound and usb for power so cables stay somewhat neat.
Once the monitor is fully set-up it certainly is a chunky boy, taking up most of my desk, but the amount of screen real estate it provides is pretty amazing. I use Microsoft powertoys to break it up into 3 main zones for easier organisation.
Zone on the right is half the screen which makes it into a 27 inch monitor with 16 by 9 aspect ratio and it is mainly used for watching videos. The left side is broken into two sections to allow for multiple documents or web pages to be opened for general work.
Gaming performance is a somewhat mixed bag. The advertised 4ms gray-to-gray response time is reasonable and having a high refresh rate is nice in games. The large screen on the other hand is a bit of a hit and miss. The support for ultra wide displays in games is certainly getting better but it is not available in all of them.
For example, competitive games like League of Legends or Starcraft 2 are actually worse on this monitor if you stretch it to full screen as you simply cannot see the whole screen at the same time. These games are so fast paced that you have no time to move your head left and right.
I found myself setting the games to windowed mode and simply centring it using standard 16 by 9 aspect ratio. Having said that, this may be a nice thing for streamers though, as you can leave Twitch chat on one side and OBS settings on the other.
On a flipside - games that are less competitive and more adventure or exploration based can be very immersive (providing they support ultra wide screens). I really like playing Horizon Zero Dawn on this monitor as the game is simply beautiful and it feels incredibly immersive when most of my field of view is covered by the monitor.
Next let's delve deeper into the panel quality. It is a 10 bit panel which is nice, but I would not read into HDR advertisement too much as at 350 nits it's not really HDR. The correct term to use here would be - it can display HDR content. Prism+ advertises 140% sRGB coverage and following our test (using Calman Color Calibration Software) we can confirm this. In fact our test shows 146% which is great but it does have one caveat - the out of the box colour accuracy of this display is pretty mediocre.
For those who are not aware - colour accuracy is measured in difference also known as delta E value to actual colour. The values between 1 and 3 are noticeable to professionals, 3 to 5 are noticeable to enthusiasts and 5+ will be noticeable to everyone.
This monitor comes at an average delta E value of 5.2 and maximum 7.6 out of the box. Personally I feel this is ok for a consumer grade display. After all, the main selling point here is the amount of screen real-estate. If you are looking for a colour accurate display you should look for a more purpose built monitor that is likely using an IPS panel.
Next, we checked out the backlight bleed and our unit did not show anything particular while looking directly at it. Once you look from a side angle, you can see more pronounced illumination on the edges but this being a curved display, you will likely want to look at it head on anyway.
To summarise: if you are in the market for a few monitors or one monster monitor and have plenty of desk space then this Prism+ X490 Pro is a very good contender. In my opinion it is best for productivity tasks such as multiple web pages or excel documents as this size screen really frees you from needing to alt-tab between different windows. It does OK in gaming, providing you are fine with the limitations. If on the other hand you need something more specific, like a monitor for colour accurate work or competitive gaming - you will need to look elsewhere.
