Acer Z57 MiniLED 4K 49” Super Ultrawide Gaming Monitor Review

This absolute behemoth is… well… It’s ridiculous. It is so huge it doesn’t fit well in frame, nor does it really fit in this room. This is Acer’s Z57, a somewhat unique super ultrawide gaming monitor. The biggest unique factor – something I haven’t had in before – is that this is actually a 4K resolution. It’s 7680 by 2160 – that’s 8K wide and ‘4K’ high. That’s a big upgrade over the 5120×1440 resolution the rest of these 32:9 beasts offer, offering a level of sharpness and clarity only found on 27 inch 4K panels – of which this is basically two side-by-side. All of those pixels are driven to change 120 times per second, and the extra spice here is the 2304 MiniLED backlight zones which if I had to guess was an array of 96 by 24, so let’s take a look at this thing and see why on earth you’d spend £2,000 on a gaming monitor! At least you can say you are physically getting a lot for your money… Which brings me nicely onto the physicality. As should be clear, this thing is massive. It isn’t just wide, it’s deep, with an incredibly tight 1000R curve that wraps entirely around your head, enveloping you in your game. It’s also hefty, with the stand itself taking up an inordinate amount of desk space. This is a normal one by one point five metre desk and this thing barely fits on the desk. The display itself is wider, but even the stand takes up almost the whole desk. You need a lot of space to make this thing work. To say it’s intrusive would be a significant understatement.

The back does have a nice RGB ring, not that you’ll see it. You’ve got rear-firing speakers built in which actually sound somewhat decent, although if you’re spending £2000 on a monitor I sincerely hope you aren’t using it’s built in speakers, and IO is two HDMI 2.1 ports, DisplayPort 1.4, USB C and a USB 3 hub and an audio jack. You do still have adjustability in height, tilt and even swivel, although the heft of the panel is pretty obvious both in how difficult it is to move the damn thing, and in the wobble that a single central mounting point offers. It isn’t terrible, but it isn’t exactly solid. The on screen menu is controlled by a joystick switch on the chin bar, and the menu is actually pretty tiny – I’d prefer it to be scaled up at least a little here if possible. The menu is Acer’s usual layout, although it’s pretty slow to respond which can be a little annoying. The main option you’ll likely want to play with is the local dimming setting which has three options, off, Standard and High. Off is as expected, the local dimming is turned off and the backlight operates like normal making blacks look grey and crushing the low end. Standard turns the zones on (or should I say off?), but not quite all the way on. It’s meant to be a halfway measure to combat haloing, although to be honest if you’re going to turn this on, turn it on fully and be done with it. High looks the most “locally dimmed”, at least, and the distinction between Standard and High really doesn’t matter much in my opinion. 

The local dimming zones seem to do something rather interesting. The problem with local dimming – especially as compared to an OLED that only lights up each pixel that requires lighting – is that the backlight zones aren’t one pixel wide. They are tens or hundreds of pixels wide and tall, so when you have bright objects on dark backgrounds, what you tend to get is haloing – a glow around that light object where the backlight zones around the edges have to be turned on to actually like the object, but the LCD in front of it can’t quite cut all the light out so you get a glow, a halo. The interesting decision Acer seems to have made here is to favour just not turning those edge zones on. That means you don’t get haloing on the outer edges of a bright object – you get negative haloing on the inside. The outer edges are faded, darker, and sure as hell still flicker on movement like most local dimming backlights, which is honestly just as distracting. Personally I’d rather have no local dimming or 1:1 local dimming (ie an OLED), rather than this compromised solution. It does work, and in the right circumstances it can look much better than a regular LCD (or even the same panel with local dimming off), but I don’t know that I’d leave that on personally. I should also note that turning local dimming on does dim the brightness and change the colour profile slightly. With local dimming off I was seeing 96% coverage of DCI P3 and 75% of Rec2020, about 420 nits and a 3000:1 contrast ratio, and an average DeltaE of just 1.08 which is excellent, but with local dimming on High you get about 30 nits less of brightness (although an infinite contrast ratio) and an average DeltaE of 2.00 with worse results across the board. That’s still not bad, but the colour difference was noticeable to the eye for sure.

I did, of course, test the response times, and on the whole it’s reasonable. On the “Normal” overdrive mode you get around 5.6 milliseconds on average, which isn’t bad, although isn’t amazing. It is within the refresh rate window though, which is the most important thing. The “Extreme” overdrive mode does improve the initial response time down to 3.8 milliseconds, but due to the horrendous overshoot time it actually lengthens the perceived response time to nearly 8 milliseconds which isn’t great. That’s actually slower overall that with overdrive off, which is around 7.2 milliseconds on average. A look at the high speed footage from the normal overdrive mode shows it just fitting in between refreshes – but only just. It’s perfectly fine, but far from OLED-fast. As for latency, that’s spot on at just under half the refresh rate, so we’re all good there. 

The big thing for me has to be the resolution. Sure, you’re basically playing on half an 8K display – or two 4K displays at once – which means you need a 90 class card to do basically anything with this, but again if you’ve got two grand to spend on a monitor I imagine you have two grand to spend on a graphics card so meh. What I can say is that this offers a level of sharpness and clarity that you really don’t see anywhere else, especially when you tie the shear width into it. It’s crisp, clear, and incredibly immersive. Just sitting in front of it and being utterly enveloped by it is an experience of its own. To play games on it… damn, that draws you in. In something like a racing game my god is this good. The full width of your peripheral vision is covered, so you can see everything. You feel like you are in the driver’s seat, and having to physically turn your head when you’re drifting to look out the side window to see where you’re going is just so cool. Of course that width really just becomes a drawback in FPS games as your HUD is now a full head-turn away from you. Want to have a quick peek of the minimap? Good luck. Need to check ammo? See you in five. It’s immersive as hell, but it’s also, kinda, like… too thin? The problem I have with basically all these super ultrawide 32:9 displays is that while regular 21:9 ultrawides give you just a bit of extra screen real estate and a bit more immersion without sacrificing too much in the way of usability, this thing looks like a letterbox. It looks like you’ve got a pinstripe view of the world, and I can’t help but feel like I’d feel more comfortable sat in front of a 65 inch TV than I would this. It’d be frankly even more immersive, taking up more vertical view too, and it’d feel a bit less cramped. This one doesn’t suffer from the same issue the other 32:9 displays I’ve had in had, feeling like it’s unusably thin, but still it’s something you do notice when using it. 

Since I’ve already mentioned the price I think it’s clear where I stand on that one too. This is an incredibly immersive display with a good amount going for it. The local dimming isn’t quite there – 2304 zones but 16.6 million pixels (or 7,200 pixels per zone exactly) just isn’t enough to get a good experience with it, and while it is undoubtably immersive, sharp and vibrant, it just doesn’t give me the ‘fizz’ as James May would say, in the same way Sony’s M10S 480Hz OLED did. There’s also a bit of an elephant in the room here too – the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 with the same panel and backlight, but a 240Hz refresh rate, all for the same (or £100 less) money. If you truly wanted this sort of display – and I’m not entirely sure who at least here in the UK would have space for it if nothing else – why would you not get that one? Sure, the panel can’t really drive 240Hz even with overdrive, but it’s cheaper, has better specs, and it’s from a panel manufacturer. I can’t say for sure as I’ve not had that one in, but at least on paper I’m left feeling a little confused by this Z57. If it was £1,500 I could see why you might opt for this, but for the same, or slightly more? I’m not so sure.