It's been a few months since MSI introduced its Prestige PS341WU monitor, an ultrawide 34-inch display with a 5120x2160 resolution, built primarily for creators. If you've been waiting for this one, good news—it's now up for preorder.
Bear in mind this is not a monitor for hardcore gaming of any kind. It only has a 60Hz refresh rate and a comparatively underwhelming 8ms GTG (gray to gray) response time. There's no mention of G-Sync or FreeSync support, either. In short, it's not going to make our list of the best gaming monitors.
That's not to say you couldn't play games on it, just hitting its native resolution would be a stretch. As in, literally—it offers the same vertical resolution as a 4K monitor, but is stretched wider. That makes it a "5K2K" display, as opposed to a true 5K monitor, which would be 5120x2880. It's basically a 21:9 aspect ratio (21.33:9 to be exact). The company's pitch is that the display provides a full-size 4K window and a "buffer workspace" to preview content at the same time.
MSI rates the brightness at 450 nits, though it must reach at least 600 nits peak, because it's a DisplayHDR 600 certified monitor. One of the requirements of the DisplayHDR 600 tier is being able to hit 600 nits. It also boasts 98 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. That means it has a wide color gamut and should be suitable for professional graphics work.
As for connectivity, there are two HDMI 2.0 ports, a DisplayPort 1.4 input, a USB-C (DisplayPort) port, and three downstream USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports.
We have not seen this one in person, but our friends at AnandTech did, noting that it looks great.
The Prestige PS341WU is up for preorder at B&HPhoto for $1,199.99. It releases on September 16.
