The Iiyama XUB3493WQSU is a low cost, reasonable quality IPS screen with a few minor issues that shouldn’t detract from the ultrawide experience. If you’re looking for a good quality, budget ultrawide, this should be near the top of your list!

Background

Ultrawide monitors. They’re the current “big thing” in the monitor industry, with big brands producing 49″ super ultrawides. Much as I’d like to own such screens, I really don’t have that kind of money (or space)! So I spent many months investigating ultrawide monitors with just a few specifications:

• It must have an IPS panel, in my mind they’re generally superior in terms of colour and quality
• It must be at least 34″ in size, otherwise it’s smaller than my current work monitor I’d be replacing it with
• It must be at least 3440 by 1440, again to make it practical as a replacement
• It must be flicker free. I’m really sensitive to some types of light flickering; they give me migraines
• Ideally, it shouldn’t make me regret the purchase too much afterwards! (because money).

After dreaming of a number of the LG utltrawides for some time, but not being able to justify £700+ for a screen, I discovered the Iiyama 34″ XUB3493WQSU, an IPS panel with flicker free technology. I have to admit, when I found this I thought it was too good to be true and passed it by a few times. The listing on Ebuyer and Amazon were not clear about it’s flicker free credentials and there were no reviews of it anywhere online (this has since changed). Having interrogated the Iiyama website about this screen, I decided to give it a go and below are my impressions.

 

Initial Impressions

I purchased the screen from Ebuyer, a UK based company. They shipped the monitor in its original packaging (no extra box, so that the shipping label was stuck onto the actual Iiyama packaging). It’s large, but as a result is well packaged, with polystyrene cutouts protecting the screen. It comes with a few cables and power lead. It’s reasonably easy to remove from the packaging.

The first thing this screen reminded me of was a Dell Ultrasharp. It’s got a similar bezel to the 2015 models and has a stand that provides some tilt, pivot and height adjustment. Note: there is a sticker on the stand stating that the pivot function is not supported; this makes sense, since the monitor is so wide it can’t really go anywhere!

The size of this monitor does not come across very well in the photos I’ve taken, but it certainly makes an impression of being big!

The screen feels well built, as well built as the Dell monitor, which is impressive given they were almost the same price! The stand offers significant height adjustment – a little over 12CM total movement. Pivot and (unsupported) tilt is also quite impressive.

Ultra-Wide, Ultra-Good?

The monitor is really easy to set up (with the slight exception of its sheer size on my desk). I did find my old display port and HDMI cables didn’t work – the screen wouldn’t display anything but black. It’s possible that due to their age they don’t support modern standards used by this monitor. The included cables felt a little cheap, but the monitor worked perfectly after swapping the cables out.

I did find that there’s a lot of light bleed with the screen – something that plagues IPS screens. This is something that’s hopefully visible in the pictures below, notice that the light bleed from the bottom left hand side of the screen is significantly worse than the right hand side.

As you can hopefully make out the Tomb Raider screen is darker and shows a lot more light bleed than a brighter screen as seen in the Orville simulator. If this is the kind of thing that bothers you, then re-consider buying this screen! I actually find that it’s not too noticeable when properly engaged in a game.

The actual game play on this screen is reasonably good (coming from the Dell u2514h, which is not a gaming monitor in itself). I did get some screen tearing, but my graphics card is a reasonably (7 years) old Nvidia Zotac 770 so it can’t take advantage of the freesync support this monitor provides. I would suggest getting a better graphics card than I have for any reasonable game players out there! It’s okay for older games such as counter strike source, but the newer Tomb Raider games really struggle (as you may have noticed from my 17 frames per second). Game play is actually surprisingly immersive, I cannot describe the experience, but once you’ve used an ultrawide you likely won’t want to go back!

Working on the screen is reasonably easy to do, and I can comfortably have a Libre Office Writer and Firefox window open side by side at the same time. It’s also reasonably good for coding, although I would say that a two or three screen setup is better supported with window snapping than the single display. This is important if you code like I do with about 5 different windows in active use! The text is clear and sharp, really to the extent that I would say it is the same as the Dell Ultrasharp.

The main problems with the Iiyama XUB3493WQSU are reasonably supervicial. First is of course the light bleed. It’s an IPS screen and to some extent you need to live with it. My next biggest complaint is the delay both in turning on and switching inputs. The input switch lag is crazy; we’re not talking a couple of seconds, it’s more like 8! There’s a lot of hesitation in the monitor when using the input buttons as well and the menu can be almost impossible to use. Once you’ve got the monitor configured as you want I would advise never touching the input buttons again for fear of messing something up and getting stuck in the menu somewhere! One last complaint is there’s a noticeable polarization effect on the left and right hand edge of the screen. I couldn’t get a good picture of this, but I’ve noticed that with a scroll bar for a web browser on the right hand side, I sometimes have to move my head to the left to stop the polarizing filter from “hiding” it behind blackness.

Overall, I think this screen has ticked all the boxes for me. I really like it. I like using lots of windows at once and my work layout is actually far easier to make dynamic based on activity with the extra real-estate to play with. I think it’s pitfalls are worth putting up with given the value of the screen, especially if you’re after an ultrawide!

Note: it does have picture in picture for multiple inputs at the same time, but I haven’t really used this feature. Given the clumsy on screen menu input, I’ve set the monitor up how I wanted it and then dared not touch it again!