(Image credit: Future)

The new MSI MPG 341CQR QD-OLED X36 has an utterly appalling name for an incredibly appealing monitor. Our Jeremy spent the Christmas week testing the new gaming screen featuring the very latest 5th Gen Samsung QD-OLED panel, and has come out the other side giving it an ed's pick award and a high score of 92%.

Review

"This MSI is a fantastic demonstration of Samsung's latest QD-OLED tech. The HDR experience is stupendous, the ambient light absorption issue is mostly entirely solved and the subpixel structure has been sorted. It's just needs a few more pixels to be absolutely perfect for both gaming and daily computing." -Jeremy Laird

Read our full MSI MPG 341CQR QD-OLED X36 review.

And he's not an easy person to please when it comes to gaming monitors, especially those with actually relatively low resolutions and pixel density figures. After all, the new MSI display is a 34-inch ultrawide with a 3440 × 1440 native resolution and therefore a 110 ppi density metric.

With every other QD-OLED I've tested and touched with my eyeballs, that combination would have us all retching uncontrollably. Font fringing. That's the problem, and it makes all those old 34-inch panels—and basically anything with a native res under 4K and/or screen size bigger than 32-inches—seriously unpleasant to use for anything outside of pure gaming.

When you've got a game loaded up fullscreen, and you're fragging away with gay abandon, then you'll notice not a thing and be wondering why I'm making sick cat noises around your 1440p OLED monitor. But as soon as you exit and try to read pretty much any bit of text rendered in Windows you'll see what I mean and the dry heaving will begin.

Without getting too technical, the issue is down to the subpixel layout of previous QD-OLED panels which used a weird triangular structure. The design is absolutely fine for a TV you're going to be sat on a sofa watching, less so for a smaller panel that's going to be positioned a couple of feet (at most) from your nose.

The result was an indistinct edge to fonts and coloured fringing around the outside. With the new RGB stripe layout—essentially just the red, green, and blue subpixels arranged left to right—that issue is all but entirely removed. Take this to a 27-inch 4K panel and it will be completely gone, I'd wager.

Right now, it's only available in this 34-inch 3440 × 1440 Samsung panel, but further panel configurations will become available throughout the coming year.

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