Picture Quality

The Gigabyte GS34WQC features an 8-bit VA panel capable of displaying 16.7 million colors. The panel has a pleasant 1500R curvature radius, which is considered optimal for 34-inch ultrawide monitors, as it prevents viewing angle issues, such as vignetting, while being subtle enough that you stop noticing it after using the monitor for a short while.

The backlight unit is controlled by direct current (DC), which makes it flicker-free at any given brightness level. The screen coating on the Gigabyte GS34WQC is light anti-glare (AG). The screen is fairly 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. The maximum specified brightness of the panel is 300 cd/m², accompanied by a static contrast ratio of 4,000:1.

As for the image sharpness, 3440x1440 pixels stretched over a 34-inch ultrawide panel results in a pixel density of 110 PPI. This gives you sharp fonts, icons, and other visual elements of whatever's being displayed on the screen. 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.

To test the picture quality of the Gigabyte GS34WQC, I've used a combination of the X-Rite i1Display Pro, DisplayCAL – a powerful software solution for display calibration and profiling, which is completely free to use, assuming you own a supported colorimeter – and Calman, the industry-standard display testing and calibrating software suite.

Picture Quality at Factory Settings

The picture quality of the Gigabyte GS34WQC at its factory defaults was tested right after allowing it to warm up for about an hour.


At default settings, the panel is configured somewhat conservatively (although not necessarily bad). With the factory-adjusted "ECO" picture profile active, the picture brightness is fairly low, measuring 163 cd/m², but other parameters look good. The white point is set to nearly ideal 6,479 K, the average gamma is 2.24, the average grayscale accuracy is solid (ΔE 2,4), and the static contrast ratio reaches 3,424:1, as expected from a VA panel. The color accuracy is surprisingly decent as well. The colorimeter shows an average ΔE 2.4, with the highest deviation of ΔE 4.83, detected on blue color tones. The blue color channel is generally slightly out of balance with red and green balance, which is something we'll look into fixing by playing with the OSD settings. Regardless, many significantly more expensive ultrawide monitors measure far worse than the Gigabyte GS34WQC at default settings, so that's a definite win for the GS34WQC.


The CIE diagram shows 100% coverage of the sRGB space (the actual sRGB gamut volume is 130.3%). The monitor also offers 90.7% DCI-P3 gamut coverage and 83.1% Adobe RGB gamut coverage.


The OSD offers a sRGB picture mode. After activating it, most display parameters, such as contrast, gamma, temperature, saturation, sharpness, and blue color filtering, are locked. The only thing we can change is the brightness of the display. The sRGB color profile further improves color accuracy, lowering the average ΔE to 1.9, but it lowers grayscale accuracy and contrast, so most users will see no benefits in using it.

Instead, to get the most out of the panel without doing an actual hardware calibration, you should tweak a couple of settings in the OSD. First and foremost, select a picture profile that gives you access to all settings, such as "Standard" or "Custom." If you decide to go with the Standard profile, go to Picture > Standard > Color Temperature, select User Define and balance the color channels manually. My sample of the monitor worked best after setting the red channel (R) to 49, the green channel (G) to 46, and the blue channel (B) to 48. The only other setting I had to change was brightness (Picture > Standard > Brightness). I was aiming for around 250 cd/m², which is a good middle ground for combined daytime and nighttime usage. I achieved that value by setting the Brightness to 88.

Let's compare the measurements before and after doing the OSD tweaks.



After these simple modifications, we got a very pleasing image, with accurate gray tones (ΔE 1.3), good white color temperature (6,466 K), a contrast ratio of 3,080:1, and a brightness of 256 cd/m². The color accuracy was maintained at a satisfactory ΔE of 2.4, and the maximum deviation was lowered to 4.09. These are very good values for an affordable ultrawide VA panel.


This is what the luminance and color uniformity of the Gigabyte GS34WQC look 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. The luminance uniformity on my sample of the Gigabyte GS34WQC is excellent. The average deviation in relation to the reference point - the dead center of the screen - does not exceed 6%, which is unnoticeable to the naked eye. The contrast deviation is also very good, except in the lower right corner of the panel, where it climbs to 17%. Fortunately, this does not cause any noteworthy difficulties in using the monitor in real life.

Picture Quality After Calibration

I calibrated the display by 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.

Here's what we get after calibrating the monitor.



After the calibration, the average color accuracy, when measured in the sRGB space, drops to an excellent ΔE of 0.54. The maximum deviation is reduced to 1.51. When calibrated, Gigabyte's monitor can be used for more demanding tasks than gaming and office work.

Backlight Uniformity

To give you an idea of the backlight's uniformity, I set the brightness of the monitor 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 bleed along the top and bottom edges of the panel, but it is completely unnoticeable when using the monitor.

Viewing Angles

The viewing angles of the VA panel built into the Gigabyte GS34WQC are good. There's no visible shift in colors when you change your sitting position. Gigabyte was smart to give the 34-inch ultrawide panel a slight 1500R curvature, which solves any potential vignetting issues around its edges.