LG's 34-inch 5K UltraWide monitor demands good eyes

It probably comes as no surprise that LG's 34-inch 5K UltraWide monitor is a joy for the eyes; just make sure you have an up-to-date prescription for your glasses. Announced last month, the pixel-dense display again made us question why Apple is leaving other companies to make the accessories we really think it should be responsible for, but having set eyes on the 34-incher at CES 2018 today we can't really complain about whose logo is on there.

5K means 5,120 x 2,160, and that's a whole lot of pixels. Indeed, even with 34-inches of very, very wide screen, it makes for a monitor that could be tricky to use if you don't have great eyesight or decent corrective lenses.

The 34WK95U may be catnip to macOS users, but LG had it plugged into one of its own laptops to demonstrate. That was running Windows 10, and you really had to look closely to see the time and date in the notification section. Of course, you could crank up the magnification, but then that hardly seems like a good use of 5K.

Eyesight aside, there's plenty to love about the UltraWide. LG has shrunk the bezels as much as it can around all four edges, meaning there's no chunkier bottom section just for the sake of a larger company logo, which is appreciated. The "edge-arc" stand is less over-designed than many such examples on other monitors; it's also impressively sturdy.

On the back, the Thunderbolt 3 connection does just what you'd hope it would: handle power and data in a single cable to your MacBook Pro or Windows 10 notebook. You'll need a decent machine in order to run that maximum resolution, naturally, but that shouldn't be too great a problem since we're mainly seeing high-end hardware monopolize Thunderbolt 3 right now.

The big question – and, ironically, the one LG couldn't answer today – is how much the 34-inch 5K UltraWide monitor will cost, and when we can have it. Those are answers that will have to wait until later in 2018 to be addressed. It's probably a safe bet that the answer to one of them will be "a significant amount of money," so best start saving now.