Lenovo Legion R34-30 review – an ultrawide gaming monitor on a budget TechTricks365

With the gaming monitor world seeing all sorts of interesting developments in OLED technology, ultra-high refresh rates, and more, the Lenovo Legion R34-30 is something of a throwback to a simpler time. It’s a decently large, 34-inch ultrawide LCD panel with a 3,440 x 1,440 resolution and reasonably speedy, but not ground-breaking, 180Hz refresh rate. It has few extra features to speak of, but has a reasonable price, and its VA panel produces an impressively high contrast ratio.

It’s a combination that is enough to earn this display a spot on our best gaming monitor guide as an entry-level 34-inch option. However, the appeal of this Lenovo display does very much depend on getting it at the right price, and on your priorities for a gaming panel. I’ve put the monitor through its paces in games, response time testing, and image quality to show you what it can do.

Specs

Features

The Lenovo Legion R34-30 is a relatively simple display when it comes to features. So, for instance, you don’t get a USB hub, there’s no pop-out headset stand, and it doesn’t have any extra RGB lighting. It also doesn’t have any extras within the panel, such as a multi-zone backlight to boost contrast or black frame insertion modes to reduce motion blur.

However, what you do get is a curved VA LCD panel that delivers what I’ve long considered the ideal balance of resolution and size. The 34-inch size nicely fills your typical gaming desk without totally dominating it like a 49-inch superwide display, such as the MSI MPG 491CQP. This size also enables you to comfortably display two desktop windows side-by-side, plus it’s ideal for watching movies made with extra-wide 1.85:1 or 2.39:1 aspect ratios. It’s great for games too, especially cinematic AAA titles such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

You can get 34-inch displays with a 2,560 x 1,080 resolution, but the image looks rather blocky at this screen size. The higher 3,440 x 1,440 resolution here is much sharper and ideal for running the display at native resolution at all times, without any need to use Windows scaling. Most mid-range graphics cards can also cope with gaming at this native resolution too, saving you having to resort to upscaling, which often isn’t the case with even higher resolution screens, such in the best 4K gaming monitors.

With this display using a VA-type LCD panel, it comes with some obvious pros and cons. Like any LCD panel, it uses a backlight that shines through the LCD layer to create its image, rather than each pixel emitting its own light, as with OLED. That means it can’t show true blackness, so you don’t get the effectively infinite contrast of OLED. However, of the three main types of LCD panels, VA LCDs have the lowest black level and highest contrast. To that end, this display comes with a 3,000:1 contrast ratio – triple what most IPS and TN panels can provide.

On the downside, VA is notorious for having the slowest response time of LCD panel types – you can read my IPS vs VA vs TN guide for a full explainer of the differences. Lenovo’s specs list the display as hitting as low as a 0.5ms response time in ideal conditions, with 1ms in more typical conditions, and 5ms in “Normal Mode.” We put these claims to the test in the gaming performance section of this review.

Elsewhere, the display claims a fairly modest maximum brightness of 350 cd/m²  and it uses just an 8-bit panel that can display 16.7 million colors, rather than the 1.07 billion colors of a higher-grade 10-bit panel. This also means it has no meaningful claims regards HDR. It does have a slightly extended color range (90% DCI-P3) to boost the vividness of bright colors, but you’re not getting the increased granularity of differences between colors that defines a true HDR image.

AMD Freesync support is also included, so you can game without image tearing or stutter, and we tested that this works with both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards as well, with the monitor able to cope with you enabling Nvidia G-Sync.

In terms of extra physical features, the display includes a stand with height, rotation, and tilt adjustment, plus it has one DisplayPort 1.4 port and two HDMI 2.1 video inputs, as well as a 3.5mm audio output. It also includes two 3W speakers. The latter are as weak as you might expect, with even the $35 Creative Pebble V3 speakers or $25 Redragon GS560 soundbar far outclassing them, but they’re useful to have if you otherwise only have a gaming headset.

Design

The Lenovo Legion R34-30 has a largely simple and utilitarian design, with an all-black finish to the frame and rear of the panel, as well as the stand. There are a few sections on the stand where the otherwise uniform matt texture has been given a glossy finish, plus the cable hole has a blue lining and the base has a girder-like support structure running through it, but that’s about it for design flair.

The design of the stand is notable, though, for its sheer size. The feet spread out to be 21.5 inches (55cm) wide at the front, and stretch 12.5 inches (32cm) from front to back. For comparison, the Dough Spectrum Black 32 that I’m also testing has a rectangular stand base that measures just ~8 x 9 inches (20 x 22cm).

The panel also has a 1,500-inch radius curve (1500R) that helps wrap the wide screen view around you a little, and also helps in keeping the viewing angle of the panel closer to perpendicular when you’re sitting in front of the screen.

Image quality

Right out of the box, our sample of the Lenovo Legion R34-30 looked rather underwhelming. There was a slightly washed-out look that was not impressive when just navigating the Windows desktop with its brightly lit rocky landscape wallpaper.

However, firing up some games and video showed that the R34-30 does exhibit the low black levels and resultantly high contrast you’d expect of a VA panel. Wandering through the opening scenes of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, you can really appreciate the darker depths of the forest or the gloomy corners of the museum compared to typical IPS or TN LCD monitors. Meanwhile, playing a few rounds of CS2 proved the R34-30 can provide punchy colors too.

However, jumping into the onscreen menus to tweak the settings showed that this screen definitely benefits from increasing its gamma. Gamma is the measure of the rate of change of colors from dark to light, with a low gamma tending to give displays a slightly lighter look and a high gamma tending to darken the overall look. Changing from the default setting to the +0.2 setting gave the image a look that seemed more natural and less washed out.

Testing the display with our Calibrite Display Plus HL colorimeter showed that the display’s gamma setting wasn’t particularly far off what it should be for ideal color reproduction. In our tests, it recorded a figure of 2.13, with the ideal being 2.2. Increasing the gamma by +0.2 in the menu saw our recorded figure jump to 2.34, which, in theory, is considerably further from ideal than the default setting, but it ultimately looked better.

As for other measurements, the display proved it can just about match its claimed contrast, with us measuring it at 2,967:1. However, the display’s maximum brightness couldn’t hit its claimed 350 cd/m², instead topping out at 318 cd/m². That’s still plenty for most uses, but I did have to set the display to full brightness to use it in my office during sunny weather.

Another slight issue is that text has just a slight graininess to it on this display. I suspect there’s some color dithering going on here, or that it’s to do with the viewing angles of VA panels, but I wasn’t able to fully pin down the issue. I do sometimes find VA displays aren’t as sharp for text as IPS panels, and it’s one of the reasons I recommend IPS for most uses, with VA’s strengths being its black levels for video and AAA gaming.

Talking of viewing angles, the slight curve of this display does help keep a reasonably uniform look to this panel, but, again, VA panels aren’t quite as stable when viewed slightly off-axis as IPS screens, and as a result, you can see some slight color shift towards the edges of the panel. This is most noticeable again on the Windows desktop and office apps, where you have a lot of flat expanses of subtly different gray and white colors, so any lack of uniformity is very obvious. However, in games and video, it’s far less of an issue, so it all depends on your priorities.

One final point about image quality is that the curve doesn’t help with reflections. With a bright window in front of this panel (behind my head), its curve actually pulls more of the brightness into your view, so again, it’s not ideal for brighter office spaces. This is demonstrated in the image above, which shows the screen tilted up to avoid reflections (bottom left), tilted to capture the full reflection (bottom right), then directed so it would otherwise avoid the reflection, were it not for the curved edges of the screen actually catching the reflection (top). When it comes to gaming and video, though, the tighter view does create a nice wraparound effect.

Gaming performance

Gaming on the Lenovo Legion R34-30 is impressively slick for a relatively budget VA panel. VA panels have a well-earned reputation for having the poorest response times of most LCD panels, and in my tests, there was strong evidence of this if you run the display without overdrive. However, by turning up the display’s overdrive, it tightens up its response without too many visual downsides – that is, color overshoot.

With no overdrive, I recorded an average initial response time (the time taken for a pixel to initially change from one color to another) of 8.4ms with an average complete response time (the time for any color overshoot to settle down) of 12.4ms. Those are slow figures, with faster LCD panels easily delivering figures twice as quick, and OLED panels being 100x faster.

However, with overdrive set to level two out of four, these figures dropped to 6ms and 8.4ms respectively, with no visible color overshoot (known as inverse ghosting). Then, at level three (above), these figures hit 3.7ms and 8.2ms, while at level four, this display hit just a 2ms initial response, but, thanks to a lot of color overshoot, my OSRTT tool recorded a complete response time of 11.9ms.

What does that all ultimately mean? Essentially, if you run the display at its default overdrive level of two, or crank it up to level three, you get a decently responsive panel. At level four, it’s even quicker, but there’s noticeable inverse ghosting or haloing around moving parts of the image. You can see the difference in no overdrive, overdrive level two, and overdrive level four (from left to right) in the image below using the Blurbusters UFO test.

This panel is still comfortably slower than the fastest TN monitors that can hit under a 2ms average response time, but it still delivered a decently snappy feel when playing the likes of CS2 or Apex Legends. Combined with the 180Hz maximum refresh rate and smooth, tear and stutter-free frames thanks to Freesync and you’ve got a solid monitor that’s usable for a wide range of gaming. It wouldn’t be our first pick for serious competitive gaming, but it’s good for other titles.

Price

The Lenovo Legion R34-30 price is $449 /£400 at MSRP, but we have already seen it discounted by $100 in some stores. At the latter price, it’s a solid if not outstanding buy. However, at its full MSRP, it doesn’t offer particularly good value. Plenty of big-name brands have similar displays available for around the $350-$400 mark, while lesser-known brands can be had for under $250.

Alternatives

Alienware AW3425DWM

For a near-identical feature set to the Lenovo Legion R34-30 but with a sleeker design and the inclusion of a USB hub, the Alienware AW3425DWM is an obvious alternative. It also has a lower MSRP, though we’ve not tested its image quality and gaming performance ourselves yet.

Alienware AW3423DW

If you don’t mind upping your budget considerably, the Alienware AW3423DW offers the same screen size and resolution as the Lenovo Legion R34-30 but with an OLED screen. It delivers punchier colors, faster game response, and stunning contrast, but it’s a lot more expensive. Read our Alienware AW3423DW review for more info.

Verdict

It might seem like stating the obvious, but the Lenovo Legion R34-3o is a gaming monitor that lives and dies by its price. It delivers a decent gaming experience with a nice big, widescreen view, ample resolution, high contrast, punchy colors, and reasonably fast gaming response times. However, it doesn’t step up to truly impressive levels of image quality or gaming performance in any area.

As such, at the discounted prices available while I was writing this review – around $350 / £280 – it’s a reasonable buy for a big-name brand. However, at full price, it faces heavy competition from similar big-brand alternatives that physically look a little slicker and sometimes cost less money, while budget brands are significantly cheaper.

For more curved gaming monitor options, check out our best curved gaming monitor guide, or if you want a totally new way to view your games, why not have a read of our best VR headset guide.