You know what's better than ultra-wide? Super ultra-wide! Well, that's kind of arguable,
but we've got the PG-49 WCD from ASUS right here, and all I've got to say is it's cutie OLED Gen2,
it's 5120 by 1440p, which at 49 inches gives you a respectable 108-109 ppi. So you're above 100,
which is kind of what most gamers at least are looking for. If you're interested in any sort
of graphic design, you're probably looking for something a lot higher than that, but this is
totally okay for everyday use. What have we got here in the box? We've got the really nice bag of
cables that the ROG Swift monitors tend to come with, or at least the few that I've opened up have
these. I gotta say, I don't usually like getting extra bags of stuff because it just adds and it's
just more stuff I'm going to throw away, but I really like these cases that keep all the cables
kind of in line here. We've got a DisplayPort, USB-C, USB 3.0, I should also note that it is a
B to A cable, HDMI cable, it's ultra-certified and ultra-high speed, which basically means it's an
HDMI 2.1 cable, and then we have our C13 power connector. Oh, this is really nice, we get an
ASUS VIP member notice. Guess that makes me a VIP, very important ploof. Nice. And then we've got a
little booklet here. It's an 1800R curvature radius, that's why this box is so thick. That's not
very much curved, but you know, especially when it's on a 49-inch display, the curve shows up a
bit more. There's a color calibration testing report. They're claiming it's quite accurate out
of the box. Now, we've got one part of the stand, two parts of the stand. It's huge. Classic, throw
the column in and then screw it down. Man, this thing's at least like three or four pounds or
something. Just for the stand. Oh, what else? Oh, this is an adapter for if you want to vase
amount it to a ARM. And then we're going to do the old click-clack, pull it out. Oh, man, this
thing is nice. There we go. Here's a good snap. Always make sure you hear that snaps, that the
mechanism is in place and holding it nice and tight. And then I'm actually going to two-hand
this one because it's so hefty. Oh, look at the wingspan on this guy, right? Geez.
Okay, we'll take the protective foam off. I always love to see this little bit of extra
protective foam. I know it's scratched. No, no, David, don't tell me that. Don't tell, is it
actually? Oh my God, don't tease me. You're just going to give me a heart attack one of these days.
So on a display this large, you don't always get a ton of wiggle room in terms of stand
capabilities, but this one shouldn't be too bad. We got some tilt. It's actually a lot of tilt,
to be honest, for a display this size. We can go up and down, which is pretty standard. You can't
go all that high though. That's actually really not much. I would have liked a bit more height,
but then this thing would be even bigger. So it's got that nice column rotation, not a ton,
but you know, you're going to set this thing up and then just leave it there. I'm hoping this
isn't the kind of thing that you're going to put in an office and then like move it all around. Be like, hey boss, check out the thing I'm working on. No, you're going to set this up on your desk
and you are going to game or watch movies or maybe production. I don't know. It'll do 144 hertz,
which is slightly less than the 165 or 175 on the Alienware QT OLED panels. Let's be real.
As long as you're over 120, 144, you're fine. Because it's OLED, it's boasting a 0.03 millisecond
response time because it's QT OLED. OLED pixels are basically instant. And then on top of that,
what's really great, we'll get into the IO in a bit here, but it's got a built-in KVM switch
that can do 90 Watts of power delivery over USB-C. Even if you're not charging a laptop or plugging
in a laptop to this thing, that's really nice to just have 90 Watts of power delivery. So if you
want to charge your phone at your desk, just pop a cable into this thing and boop, it'll
draw a bit more power and give it to your phone. Or, you know, maybe you got a handheld that you
want to charge while you're playing games. You don't want to use an extra port somewhere. Now
you can just do it from your monitor, which is super cool. As for the IO, we've got our HDMI
2.1 port, DisplayPort 1.4. Here is the USB-C connection for our KVM. It'll also do display
port and 90 Watts power delivery right there. We've got USB-B for connecting to our computer.
We've got USB-A. It's got four total USB-A ports, so we'll talk about it in a bit. And then we've
got our SBDIF out. Kensington lock. If you really want to lock this thing down, I guess. I mean,
it's a nice monitor, two buttons, and then a navigation nipple, and then a headphone jack.
And then on top of that, we've got that USB-A port on top. You might be a little confused by all of
these USB ports, but don't forget it's a KVM switch, so this lets you hook up a number of things to
this device and let it all just work together at the press of a button. And you know what? Let's
press the power button and turn it on and take a look at it. Okay, so first of all, to get this on
the desk, we had to move things out of the way because it's enormous. The second thing is that
as soon as I sat down and started looking more at the stand, I noticed that it's got this kind of
weird off-axis, non-parallel design, and I really don't like it. It drives me crazy. This is not
the sort of thing that you will, you know, you should pay attention to. It's a pretty minor detail,
but I honestly tried to like, I thought the stand was twisted and I tried to just like lock it in
place, but no, that's just how it is. I don't like it at all. It's going to drive me nuts. As for
adjustment, oh yeah, let's lower it down. Let's get this like eye level, get the tilt a little bit.
It'll do 1000 nits on the adjustable brightness HDR setting, but it is only rated for Vesa at True
Black 400, which is a little disappointing because HDR True Black 600 is a thing now,
and this can reach 1000 nits peak brightness, just not in that HDR 400 mode. I don't know how much
actually like the menu buttons on the back rather than down here. It's just a minor
annoyance and it's something you kind of have to reach for, whereas down here it's just a little
easier. I can't actually see the corners, so I have to like shift my vision and almost shift
my whole neck actually and look down to see that this is the start menu and to see that this is
the other side with the clock and everything. I don't want to have to swivel my head to look
at more of my monitor. I don't mind doing that for a whole second screen because I'm fully shifting
my attention to that second screen, but I'm just, I really think I'm not made for super ultra-wides.
You know, a few of us really don't want this narrow strip of display because having about this and
then just that little bit of extra verticality would really just kind of help suck me in. It's
got some RGB. Is there RGB on the back? Oh yes, we got the big ASUS logo on the back doing all the
RGB things. The cool thing though is that you basically have two displays at your disposal
without any kind of middle bezel. There are a lot of great use cases 432x9. You do a lot of
spreadsheets. Maybe you want one single display solution, but you need enough space where you
have like a full screen for discord or your twitch stream or whatever and then you've got your game
over here. It's one of those things kind of like 8k resolution where I don't know how much you really
need it, but some people out there want it and so the more the merrier, man this looks good.
Every single thing that was a problem with gen one, like the text fringing, the weird kind of gray
or maroon background when it's fully off, both of those things were fixed and then they cranked
the brightness again. Now this is only going to do a thousand nits, which gen one was also able to do.
The cool thing that ASUS has done is they've got a graphene thermal dissipation layer instead of
like an aluminum heat sink. They're saying that it should help a little bit with burning. I haven't
experienced any on my own cutiola gen one panel at all and I you know I treat it pretty well,
but I've definitely done some dumb things like leaving it on on a static background
for like two days straight as I head out for the weekend or whatever and again nothing.
The picture is unbeatable. I have not seen LG's new micro lens array in their OLED technology
and maybe that looks really good. I don't know yet, but man cutiola gen two looks phenomenal.
Like that guys, oh the jacket, the white on the cherry blossoms and like her mask, it just looks
lifelike. There is something phenomenal about the technology that I just can't stop just being
amazed by, especially if you look at the black on both sides, it's just black. We've also got a
really high contrast ratio. I think they're listing 1.5 million to one on their own website.
We measured some absurdly high number. Math doesn't like dividing by zero. In HDR 400,
we capped out around 490 nits peak brightness. Turn on the adjustable brightness and then it'll go
all the way up to 1000. We did test for color accuracy and I can tell you that in HDR true black,
we're getting a very impressive average delta E of 5.3 with luminance errors in HDR content.
We're hitting a max error of I think 13.5 or so. That's pretty dang good. God,
I want a gen two panel now. Here are some of the problems that you might encounter while playing
32 by 9 content. My friends, my friends tab. Oh no, but I can't see the top because it's confused.
Oh my God. I can't. I don't know what to do. Even if in-cape, it's got a perfect
ultra wide support system. You're not going to have most menus in ultra wide and it's such a minor
complaint for me. I was playing the last of us one remake on PC in ultra wide and it brought in
when you go to upgrade your gun, for example, it cuts into this black barred mess where Joel is now,
you know, I'm grading the gun and I think that you could adjust it and all of a sudden it works,
but now you can see the animations breaking where he doesn't like his ARM doesn't fully go away or
whatever. So many people are still gaming at 1920 by 1080. When you go out and buy an ultra wide or
a super ultra wide, you're kind of setting yourself up for some annoying situations. Oh,
yo, like this looks great. This looks really good. DOOM actually keeps the UI elements like right
here where a normal 16 by 9 screen would be. Some games though, the UI will go to the edge of the
screen. So you've got to like tilt your head all the way. Having an ultra wide or super ultra wide
aspect ratio is something that is nice most of the time, but every now and then you're just going
to run into these like really weird quirks that just kind of bother you. This is the ROG Swift PG
49 WCD, beautiful monitor. If you want to check out other short circuits, check out the Yiyi
and monitor we looked at. It was a lot cheaper. It wasn't awful, but it had some weird things
that about it that I did not like mostly about the stand.