Picture Quality

The ASRock Phantom Gaming PG34WQ15R3A features a 34-inch ultrawide 8-bit VA panel with a native resolution of 3440x1440, giving it a respectable dot pitch of 0.23175 mm (around 110 PPI). The technical specifications promise a wider-than-usual gamut (115% sRGB, 91% DCI-P3), 550 cd/m² maximum brightness, and a typical static contrast radio of 3,000:1. The panel has a 1500R curvature, which brings the edges of the panel slightly closer to the user, making the monitor more comfortable to use.

The screen uses a White-LED (W-LED) backlight unit. It's controlled by direct current (DC), which makes it flicker-free at any brightness level. There's no local dimming support, meaning you can't expect much (or anything) in terms of HDR performance, despite the VESA DisplayHDR 400 badge that the monitor carries. It merely tells us it can recognize a HDR signal and display over 400 cd/m² of brightness. However, a HDR monitor this is not, and if that's what you're after, you can stop reading this review and look elsewhere.

The screen coating on the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG34WQ15R3A is light anti-glare (AG). The screen is reasonably resistant to reflecting its surroundings even when used in a room with a lot of natural or artificial light, and the picture isn't perceived as grainy or dirty from a normal sitting distance, which can be the case with heavier AG coatings.

To test the picture quality of the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG34WQ15R3A, I've used a combination of the X-Rite i1Display Pro and DisplayCAL, a powerful software solution for display calibration and profiling that is completely free, assuming you own a supported colorimeter.

Picture Quality at Factory Settings

I tested the picture quality of the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG34WQ15R3A at its factory defaults right after plugging the monitor in and allowing the panel to warm up for about an hour. My initial impression was that the colors looked washed out, most likely due to gamma tracking issues, which is quite an issue for a monitor with no gamma controls, as there's basically no way to fix such problems without a proper panel calibration, which not everyone is able to do. The white balance seemed off as well – the picture had a slight bluish tint.


After doing some initial measurements, the numbers confirmed most of what was visible to the naked eye. At factory settings, the panel of my sample of the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG34WQ15R3A had an actual brightness of 186.2 cd/m². The measured color temperature was 7,304 K – noticeably higher than 6,500 K, which is what we're after – and the gamma curve was way off. The tested sample of the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG34WQ15R3A displays everything much brighter than required by the input signal, resulting in a flat, borderline lifeless color reproduction. A fairly high static contrast ratio of 3,326:1 didn't do much to improve the situation.


The colorimeter also revealed various color inaccuracies. The average ∆E was 3.23, with a maximum measured deviation of 6.77 – quite high for a modern gaming monitor.

In terms of image sharpness, the picture looks very good. The native 3440x1440 resolution, when stretched over a 34-inch ultrawide panel, results in sharp fonts, icons, and other visual elements. You also get plenty of screen real estate to work with, partially because using Windows UI scaling isn't necessary. Simultaneously working in two Windows side-by-side feels as if you're using two monitors, but without ugly bezels splitting the image in half.

The way forward, then, is to try to fix some of the aforementioned issues by using the settings offered within the OSD. Unfortunately, as I've already mentioned, the OSD is very rudimentary and, as such, lacks many of the options you'd expect from a gaming monitor in 2023, including gamma control. In other words, there's nothing I could do about the poor gamma performance of the panel except for calibration. A few other monitor reviewers whose knowledge and methodology I respect didn't report such severe gamma tracking issues with the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG34WQ15R3A, which leads me to believe I was simply unfortunate in the panel lottery.

Even though nothing can be done about the gamma, at least we can fix the color temperature and adjust the brightness to our preference, as the actual brightness range is very wide. To get the color temperature close to 6,500 K, you have to visit the Color Temp. menu, set Color Temp. to User, and then manually adjust the individual channels. I got the best results after leaving the red channel at 50 but reducing the green channel to 42, and the blue channel to 40. Brightness is adjusted in the Luminance menu. I was aiming for around 250 cd/m², which is my preferred setting for comfortable all-day usage, and I hit that mark after setting the brightness to 75.



While we did greatly improve the white balance and further increased the contrast ratio, the gamma and color accuracy are no better with the adjusted settings; in fact, they're slightly worse, although not enough to be noticeable, which is why adjusting the settings still makes sense. At least I got rid of the bluish tint caused by the color temperature being too high at factory defaults.


This is what the CIE diagram looks like. I measured a 99.7% coverage of the sRGB and 86.2% coverage of the DCI-P3 color spaces. The gamut volume equals 122.2% for sRGB and 86.6% for DCI-P3 color spaces, respectively. The measured Adobe RGB coverage is 79.6%, with Adobe RGB gamut volume reaching 84.2%.


This is what the luminance and color uniformity of the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG34WQ15R3A looks like when measured at 25 different patches across the panel. Please click on the image to see it in high resolution and examine the data in greater detail. Luminance is stable around the center of the panel but tends to drop in the top and bottom left edge by up to 14.72% when displaying pure white. Meaning, when the monitor is displaying 250 cd/m² in the middle of the panel, the brightness in those affected areas is below 220 cd/m². This isn't something that's blatantly visible to the naked eye, but it prevents the PG34WQ15R3A from being a viable option for professional tasks, such as video or photo editing, even when calibrated. The contrast deviation doesn't go over 6.41% across the panel, so it's generally very good, while the color uniformity follows the same pattern as the luminance; it's good around the center of the panel but wanders off on the top and bottom left edges, where the colorimeter picked up maximum deviations of ΔE 4.04 and 4.33, respectively.

Picture Quality After Calibration

I calibrated the display using the X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter and the DisplayCAL software solution. The initial profiling and calibration were done with the luminance target set to 250 cd/m², which presents a happy medium for a comfortable combined daytime and nighttime usage. The calibration was conducted with the adjusted settings which I've listed above.

Here's what we get after calibrating the monitor.



After calibration, the picture quality of the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG34WQ15R3A improves greatly in every single aspect, but most notably in terms of gamma tracking and general color accuracy. There's a stark difference in the picture performance of this monitor in calibrated versus uncalibrated state, more so than in many other monitors I've tested previously.

Backlight Uniformity

To give you an idea of the backlight's uniformity, I set the monitor's brightness to 250 cd/m² before taking a photo of the panel in a completely dark room. I did my best to find a combination of the ISO value and shutter speed that would capture the screen in a way that has it look as close to what my eyes were seeing in real life.



There's some backlight bleeding around the top and bottom left edge of the panel. Still, it is mostly unnoticeable when using the monitor unless when playing an exceptionally dark game or watching a movie with a lot of shadow content.

Viewing Angles

The viewing angles of the VA panel built into the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG34WQ15R3A are decent. There's no visible shift in colors in a normal sitting position or when changing positions. When the panel is looked from the side, the colors look washed out, which is emphasized by the aforementioned gamma tracking issues (before calibration).

The 1500R panel curvature does a good job of avoiding the vignetting effect around the corners of the screen. Some vignetting can occur, but only if you're sitting uncomfortably close to the monitor.