Curve appeal.
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Over the last couple of years, Acer has doubled down on PC gaming hardware with its highly-respected Predator line of laptops and monitors. The Predator Z35P (See it on Amazon) is the company’s latest flagship offering in its display lineup, and with a 35-inch curved panel, 3440 x 1440 resolution, G-Sync, and a native 100Hz refresh rate it’s an absolute monster. Unfortunately, a giant screen and slick features don't come cheap. But if you’ve got around $1,000 to spare—and prefer a 21:9 aspect ratio—the Z35P is incredible for gaming. Let's get into the details:
Design and Features
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The very first thing anyone who pulls the trigger on the Z35P will notice is its mammoth footprint. Seriously, it’s gigantic, and not just because of its 35-inch panel. The stand alone is sturdy and attractive, but will devour a large chunk of real estate on even a large desk, requiring over a foot of space front-to-back just to set it down. Two metal feet stick out considerably further than the panel. Fitting a full-sized gaming keyboard like the Corsair K95 on the same desk is a real challenge. Granted, the Z35P is VESA mount compatible, so that’s always an option. It may sound a little silly, but depending on your specific desk set up, this is a real concern to keep in mind.
The total width of the panel —around 33 inches thanks to the curved display—will obviously require adequate space, as well. While standing on the other side of the room, it looked like I had a full-size TV sitting on my computer desk. Thankfully, the stand does swivel and tilt, so you can squeeze it just right into a desk corner. The side bezels on the Z35P are about a half-inch thick, but in comparison to the monitor’s overall size they’re barely noticeable. That’s doubly so once you turn the monitor on and get a glimpse of its expansive size and excellent picture quality.
Under the hood, the Z35P utilizes a curved Vertical Alignment (VA) panel for a nice blend of response time, viewing angles, and color reproduction. The great thing about VA panels is they’re faster than IPS displays and have really exceptional black levels. On the negative side, refresh rates generally aren’t quite up to par with Twisted Nematic (TN) displays. But it’s hard to find much fault in the Z35P thanks to its fantastic 2500:1 contrast ratio, 300 nit brightness, and sRGB compatible color spectrum. Acer claims the Z35P has a 4ms response time, although we put that figure to the test below.
Ports on the Z35P include HDMI and DisplayPort, the latter of which you’ll need to reach the 100 Hz refresh rate. The Z35P also offers an “overclock” functionality which ramps the speed up to 120 Hz. Unfortunately, Acer made a strange design choice in placing the video and audio ports in an awkwardly recessed area under the screen. Your options are to either fumble blindly to hook them up, or tilt the already cumbersome screen all the way back to see what you’re doing; it’s a real pain. Thankfully, the four USB 3.0 ports are easy to access on the back of the display.
Two 9w speakers are packed into the Predator Z35P, and like most monitor speakers, you’re better off just plugging in a headset. That’s not to say the sound is horrible for just watching an internet video, but they’re not going to win any awards for gaming audio. The on-screen display is controlled by six buttons just under the right side of the screen. The buttons work efficiently and making your way through the extensive range of menus is simple enough. The Z35P allows for an impressive amount of tweaking. There’s three picture presets, but I personally found manual control of contrast and brightness to look better to my eyes. The display menu also sports the ability to add crosshairs to your mouse reticule in shooters, and a toggle for sRGB mode if you’re editing photos or video. Finally, if you’re a stickler for getting the display just right, you can also adjust each of the six color ranges independently—a nice touch for a gaming monitor.
Testing
I used the Lagom LCD monitor test pages to get a closer look at how the Z35P performs. Using these precise images and tests, I was able to judge the panel's performance when it comes to black and white levels, color gradients, viewing angles, and response times. As expected, the Z35P and its VA panel had great black levels and displayed white colors with accurate brightness and a total lack of any clipping or over-saturation. Contrast across the board was truly exceptional, with light and dark areas immediately pronounced. The Z35P also performed with flying colors in terms of color banding and gamma. Sometimes, panels will display banded lines of separation across a gradient—like if you’re looking at the sky in a game—but the Z35P kept the transitions perfectly smooth without any discernible banding. Gamma settings were near perfect, sticking right to the Windows-standard 2.2 range.
There were some issues with viewing angles, in terms of maintaining color accuracy from left to right. But it should be noted, with a curved panel of this size, you’re probably not going to spend much time looking at the Z35P from a 45-degree angle so it’s a moot point. More important is the matter of response time. The Lagom test uses a series of pixels, flashing quickly back and forth between light and dark across the grayscale. The more flashing relative to its place on the grayscale, the longer the response time, in effect, for the transition between dark and light. While Acer claims the Z35P has a 4ms response time, it did appear response times on the darker end of the scale were quite a bit longer with intense pixel flashing. Light to dark transitions, however, performed very well. This is fairly common with VA panels, but it is worth noting.
Another common complaint with VA panels is the issue of ghosting, whereby blurred artifacts are noticeable on the screen behind fast moving objects. Using Test UFO’s ghosting test page, there was some slight ghosting noticeable with the Z35P, but it was very minor. And in fact, I never encountered any noticeable ghosting while playing a large number of games.
Gaming
It’s impossible to talk about the experience of playing games on the Z35P without addressing its 21:9 aspect ratio. On one hand, some will argue an ultra-wide monitor offers an advantage to gamers in some cases due to increased peripheral vision. And obviously, with the added bonus of a curved panel, this could be even more true. But at the same time, the games industry has been slow to adopt the 21:9 format. Some games are natively 21:9 compatible, while others will leave you playing with giant black bars on each side of the screen. And of course you'll need to have a powerful enough system to push the extra pixels.
All that said, what an ultra-wide monitor does offer beyond a doubt is a real sense of immersion when playing a compatible game. Playing Battlefield 1 on the Predator Z35P is an amazing experience. Not only are the colors and details stunning, but the added screen real estate coupled with the game's wide open environments evokes a similar feeling as VR. Similarly, playing a round of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on the Z35P was an impressive experience. I felt like I could turn my head and look around me while running across a field, keeping an eye out for enemies. Pair all that with 1440p resolution, 120Hz refresh rate, and perfectly smooth frames thanks to G-Sync, and the Predator Z35P’s lofty price tag starts coming into focus.
But then you’ll run into non-compatible games. A lot of them. When playing Cuphead, for example, you'll see giant black bars on the sides of the screen. And other games, like Overwatch, look great on the Z35P but use a zoomed-in functionality by default to adapt to 21:9 which cuts off the top and bottom of the screen. Luckily there's a Steam group that tracks which games support the 21:9 aspect ratio, so you should check it out right here if this monitor has piqued your interest.
Purchasing Guide
The Acer Predator Z35P was sold for around $1,100 for many months, but is generally available now for $999:
• See the Acer Predator Z35P on Amazon
The Verdict
Ultimately, the Acer Predator Z35P requires sacrifice not only from your wallet, but your ability to have any space for anything else on your desk. Plus, 21:9 gaming isn't for everyone at this point because the standard isn't ubiquitous. Those caveats aside, the Z35P offers a host of great features and is a well-performing display that's worth the money if for nothing else but the staggeringly immersive gaming experience.
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