Huawei’s new MateView GT makes a very impressive, stylish entry into the gaming monitor market with a high quality, beautifully designed curved 34″ screen
While Huawei has recently been taking a step back from the smartphone spotlight (after having hit the top spot in global sales a couple years ago), they’ve been accelerating their efforts in several new categories, notably earbuds, smartwatches, tablets and laptops. Late last year, they burst onto the PC monitor scene, albeit with just two initial entries, but both were remarkable showcases of design and engineering, and Huawei’s ongoing ambition to impress.
While the graphic designer and creator-focused sleek Huawei MateView is absolutely gorgeous and full of innovative features worthy of a future full review, we’re going to take a look at the gaming and entertainment oriented Huawei MateView GT, a 34″ lovely curved beast of a monitor.
Exceptional design and build quality
Huawei reliably, in category after category, loves to flex its design and engineering muscles, and the MateView GT monitor is another great example of this. In the gaming monitor category the typical plastic, trying-too-hard-to-be-futuristic approach is put in its place by Huawei’s solid, beautifully designed curved 34″ monitor. We are big fans of the design esthetic of this monitor.
It has as premium a build as any monitor in its category in matte dark gray using premium materials, mixing metals and above-average quality plastics. It’s very solid, has a good weight to it. We’re quite comfortable saying it’s the classiest looking curved monitor on the market.
The MateView GT sports a 34″ screen in 21:9 aspect rate, at 3440 x 1440 pixels with thin bezels on the top and sides. The back of the monitor is equally elegant, and would look impressive on any desk from any angle, whether in your bedroom or on a cool executive’s office desk.
We’re used to good-sized multiple monitor setups, typically 27″ screens, but having the MateView GT on our desk really took things to the next level. For gaming and video viewing, the overall experience was fabulous. (For a hyper-productive dream work-(and play-)station we’d recommend pairing the MateView GT with a good 27″ 2K IPS monitor, giving you two monitors exactly the same height in inches and pixels for a combined 6000 x 1440!)
A superb, highly immersive entertainment experience
The MateView GT has a very comfortable curve of 1500R, and it feels naturally immersive for gaming or video viewing, but not so curved that it can’t be used for other non-video work. The screen can be raised and lowered and tilted back and forth, but does not swivel.
The MateView GT offers smooth, high-frame gaming with a refresh rate of 165hz. While we aren’t seeing it in the official site feature or spec lists, we’ve been hearing that both AMD FreeSync Premium and NVidia G-Sync variable refresh game-optimizing technologies work on the MateView GT.
Huawei has opted for a VA panel, which typically gives up a bit in pixel response time, and viewing angle (which is less of an issue for most users of a curved screen). On the pro side of things, the MateView GT reaps the rewards of a good VA panel delivering great contrast ratio (4000:1), above average brightness, fabulous colours, and solid HDR (high-dynamic range) performance, particularly for gaming.
The wide colour gamut (90 DCI-pr, DeltaE less than 2 and up to 10-bit colour depth) is great for viewing or editing high quality photos or videos, going beyond what the typical gaming monitor will allow.
Let’s talk about the soundbar, touch strip and more…
It’s not unusual for monitors to integrate a couple, generally low quality, speakers into the monitor, although most gamers would have a dedicated speaker system or mostly use a gaming headset, ditto with most creators. Huawei has made a nice innovative improvement to the audio capabilities of this monitor by incorporating an almost 18″ soundbar into the tubular base – featuring dual 5-watt speakers.
We love the idea, and the execution, but wish the soundbar had a little more oomph, particularly in the low end, and higher quality at higher volumes. While we expect many gamers and creators will use an alternative sound system, one of our in-house reviewers who mostly uses headsets for audio found herself absolutely loving the soundbar as an alternative to her headphones, and felt the audio quality was as good as she needed, and left her desk extra clean and free of wires.
One of the coolest design, unique features of the MateView GT is the 7″ touch strip, vibrantly lit with variable colour RGB LED, and used to control the volume (including a double click to mute). The touch strip controls the volume of whatever audio system you use, be it a soundbar, headset, or a full high-end surround speaker system. The mood lighting RGB LED of the touch strip has eight different options – always fun – and having volume control right in front of you at all times really adds a little something special to this monitor’s, and your computing, user experience.
Additionally, Huawei has added built-in dual microphones (with echo and noise cancellation) at the top of the display. It’s good enough for routine video conferencing and phone calls, even up to 4m away, and rounds out a superb attempt at an all-in-one multimedia/communication system, particularly for those of you eager for a clean, minimalist desk setup.
On the connection side, you’ll find inputs for a DisplayPort 1.4, two HDMI, two USB-C (one supporting display/data/charging for docking a low power laptop or mobile device), and a 3.5mm headset/microphone jack.
Huawei MateView GT: The verdict
Most curved monitors are typically made specifically for gaming or watching widescreen movies. The Huawei MateView is exceptional as a gaming/entertainment monitor as its image quality, brightness, contrast, refresh rate and colour are all great. That same image quality makes it highly useable as a serious work monitor, for everything from working with images, editing video, design, music production and most other tasks you can think of.
Throw in the outstanding design and better-than-the-rest build quality, the soundbar, touch strip, and microphone – it’s pretty remarkable the MateView GT is only C$749 (and sometimes less on sale), it’s noteworthy value at that price.
If you’re looking to level up your gaming experience, and overall computer experience, we highly recommend taking a good long, wide look at the MateView GT 34″ monitor – our team is still (playfully) fighting over who gets to try it out next (or again).
For all the details and specs visit the in-depth Canadian Huawei MateView GT website.
Current approx. retail price: $749 CAD
Available at some of our favourite retailers, in-store and online: Canada Computers, Amazon, Newegg & more…
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