Acer held a bit of a mega event this week in Taipei, from which I’m reporting. Microsoft was the event partner, cos Windows 10, but the thrust of it all was a nice collection of new gear.
Amidst the pretty notebooks, smartphones, tablets and convertibles sat the good gear of the Predator gaming range, which has been absent from the Australian (and global, as far as I understand) market for a few years. To understand what the Predator range is to Acer, think Alienware to Dell. There you have it. Predator gear is updated and released sporadically, at least in the APAC region, and we will very soon be seeing several new desktop and gaming laptops here.
The design aesthetic is a bit reptilian sci-fi, and I’d bet good dollars that there’s no licensing in place with the movie stuff, but there’s no denying the strong ‘inspiration’. Anyway, it looks very cool, and as one usually averse to silly overthetopisms, this passed funky muster and I’d have one in my gaming room in a moment.
Next to the X34 curved gaming screen, which we saw and raved about at this year’s Computex a few months ago, was the good looking new Z35 monitor, which was unveiled at IFA not long ago. The Z35 is larger, of course, by a diagonal inch, but perhaps because it has more curve going on it certainly looked like more. I immediately wanted one very much indeed. It was the biggest curved gaming monitor I’ve yet seen.
It’s the curviest, too, at a curvature rating of 2000R, which means if you were 2m away from it, that distance is the radius and a 4m circle drawn around you defines the curve. Ta da. The X34 for reference is 3400R.
Acer explained that this is pretty much at the curvature limit with current screen technology – any more and the LCD pixel elements bleed and distort. For anyone who has never gamed with a curved monitor it really is a cool, immersive and enveloping experience, and not at all like the PR fluff that’s pushing curved TVs.
The model we saw had G-Sync innards, and its panel has a maximum ‘overclocked’ refresh rate of 200Mhz.
Slapping the face of 4K, this is a screen that goes for size over resolution. At just 2560 x 1080 it has an especially short vertical resolution, but the physical height is good, so that all means you can have a very high frame rate at a big screen size. Of course this overlooks the advantages of G-Sync, which renders all that a moot point.
Also largely redundant is the actual benefit of an ultrawide format. The common horizontal resolution in 34in screens is 3440, so it’s a bit of a shame that all that wide physical space won’t translate into a wider field of view.
If anything, we’ve learned that the monitor tech revolution is far from peaking, we just need much higher res. Panel tech is advancing rapidly. We’ll get there, and soon.
The Z35’s stand too is a real gem. It’s widely spread V array will let you pull it up as close as you want while still giving room for a keyboard and mouse to fit it between the legs, or as I do with the similar X34 monitor which I’m currently using at home – pull it right over the steering wheel base so it’s in your face. Magnificent.
Release date and pricing were not confirmed, but the Predator laptops and desktops will definitely be here in November.
Interestingly, during a chat I had with Oliver Ahrens, Acer’s APAC President, gaming laptop sales are surging. In our region they account for around 10% of all laptop sales. The incredible stat, though, is that according to Ahrens, over 50% of all laptop sales take place in China. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing but Mr Ahrens confirmed it. On the flipside, all tech companies are facing challenges in China as that country turns from an import market to one that has its own local products beginning to take the lion’s share of that huge market.