LG 29EA93 review

Ultra-wide 29in monitors are fast becoming the must-have displays of the moment, and the LG 29EA93 is the latest.

At first, the 29EA93’s 2,560×1,080 resolution and 21:9 aspect ratio seems strange, but you quickly get used to it. Indeed, it’s hard to go back to ordinary 16:9 monitors once you’ve become accustomed to its ultra-wide display. Not only does it help make films and games feel much more cinematic, it also comes with split-screen software to help you multitask in the office too. We installed the program without issue and were able to arrange up to four windows in a variety of ways just by clicking various options from its main menu settings.

Its glossy silver base looks much smarter than that of Dell U2913WM, but we were a little disappointed to see that the 29EA93 doesn’t let you swivel it sideways or adjust height. It felt quite low on our desk as a result and would be much better suited to wall mounting, but you can tilt the screen upwards slightly if it should prove necessary.

Design issues aside, the 29EA93 is an excellent monitor. It uses an IPS display and our colour calibrator showed it was displaying 98.5 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut at its default settings. It had excellent coverage of all the main colour areas, with purples being its only slight weakness. We managed to increase this to 99.3 per cent after calibration. It doesn’t quite match the Dell’s 99.9 per cent coverage straight out of the box, but it’s still one of the best scores we’ve seen for an IPS panel.

The good colour sRGB coverage translated to good results in our subjective image tests. Reds, greens and blues were all very rich and vibrant. Whites were bright without any hint of grey. Blacks were very deep and reflected our low black reading of 0.25cd/m² very well. However, we noticed that blacks were considerably lighter toward the bottom of the screen, particularly in the bottom left corner. The black deep black bezel made the lighter blacks on the screen all the more noticeable. It wasn’t so bad as to make us not want to use the 29EA93, though.

Our high contrast photos looked great. We recorded a contrast ratio of 1,008:1 with our colour calibrator and we saw a high level of detail in our test photos. When compared side by side with the Dell U2913WM, the LG 29EA93 had noticeably larger patches of black, showing that the Dell is just ahead when it comes to overall picture quality.

The 29EA93 has an impressive range of inputs, too. There are two HDMI inputs, one DisplayPort input, a dual-link DVI-D input, a three-port USB3 hub, a headphone jack and a 3.5mm audio line input.

One of the HDMI inputs also supports mobile high-definition link (MHL) devices. This fairly new technology lets you output the display of compatible devices to the monitor, and charge them too. We tested the feature with an HTC One X+. The phone’s display was shown horizontally on the 29EA93’s screen to make the most of its 21:9 aspect ratio. The phone’s screen was blown up to fill as much screen space as possible, making app icons and text look quite jagged. Even so, many other monitors we’ve seen with MHL only show our phones’ displays as a tiny vertical strip in the middle of the screen, so we’re happy that the LG 29EA93 makes the most of its screen space.

Another novel feature is dual-link. This lets you display two devices, such as a PC, laptop, camera, smartphone or Blu-Ray player, on screen simultaneously. You can devote equal screen space to both devices or you can overlay one device’s display over another in a small window in a similar way to a TV’s picture-in-picture feature. Unfortunately, we weren’t particularly happy with this feature, as the two displays didn’t automatically adjust to the right size or resolution, so everything appeared squashed together. There was no easy way to change this either and even changing the resolution of our PC in the Control Panel didn’t make it appear correctly.

Dual-link aside, the LG 29EA93 is a brilliant display. Its wide range of inputs and superb image quality are very impressive for a monitor at this price, and it’s certainly a good alternative to the more expensive Dell U2913WM. We marginally prefer the height-adjustable Dell, but if your budget doesn’t stretch beyond £400, you should buy the LG 29EA93.