VA will give you much better black levels and contrast. IPS is better for color accuracy. I chose VA for gaming but am replacing it with OLED ASAP to get those perfect black levels.

I’ve heard that some VA panels can get a bit wonky with text.

I haven’t. Where did you hear this?

OLEDs tend to have issues because of their subpixel layout and I don’t know the current state of font rendering support on M$'s stupid OS.

I can’t be giving people jaundice, I mean. The Acer isn’t exactly perfect either, but it’s good enough.

If your current cheap monitor is good enough, any monitor of this class will be at least as good.

If you need proper colours though, you should rather invest in a calibration device. Even good monitors should be calibrated for your specific room conditions if colour accuracy is of importance.

Whatever I choose will be my daily driver for probably 7+ years.

Then I’d get a newer OLED that isn’t prone to burn in or wait a few months for said OLEDs to do down in price.

LCDs are not future proof. The vast majority has no proper support for HDR for starters (HDRn’t).

I’m concerned that there will always be adjustments and compromises if I go curved.

Curved isn’t as significant as you imagine it to be. You usually don’t notice it at all.

Even extreme curvature as is common on Samsungs newer VA panels is only a little noticeable when you actually sit in front; eventhough it looks like a lot from the outside.

With VA, you actually want curvature as there is somewhat of a significant gamma shift when looking at a horizontal angle and the curvature helps mitigate this effect.

I really enjoyed 240hz G-Sync smoothness, but I don’t play serious competitive stuff and I could downgrade to 144hz, as long as the other benefits are worth the trade-off. I also think QHD will hover around 180fps in my current games, and UWQHD around 140 maybe. I’d probably only get the full benefit of 240hz QHD in older games.

Unless you really love playing E-sports games competitively and that makes up most of your gaming time, 144Hz is good enough. Though VRR with LFC is a must, look out for that.

Do any of you own either of these or similar monitors?

I’m not too familiar with the current market but what I can tell you is that you must always look up real-world measurements of rise and fall times, overshoot and colour accuracy. Ideally read or watch a review (TFT Central, RTings, HWunboxed/monitors unboxed).

This is especially important with VA panels as the vast majority use older tech that can have very slow rise and fall times that are often not actually sufficient for high refresh rates and/or bad overshoot. You need to filter these out.

I would not buy a monitor without having seen real-world measurements of rise and fall times aswell as overshoot.

If you have other recommendations in the $450-600 range

HW unboxed usually has many “current” monitors for comparison in their charts. I can highly recommend watching a few of their reviews.

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I personally bought a UWQHD Nano IPS panel (LG 34GN850) after attempting to buy a working Samsung G9 VA UUWQHD twice a few years ago (yay Samsung QC…). It’s decent but I wouldn’t buy it again nowadays. I really miss the contrasts of the old (S)VA panel I had before. Decent VA panels have ~3000:1 ration while rather good IPS panels only have ~1000:0; it’s really that much of a difference.

I’d only buy IPS if I couldn’t find a VA with fast enough transition times for my specific constraints or desperately needed a colour accurate display.

These days, I’d buy LG WOLED or Samsung QD-OLED (or wait for them to go down in price).

VA is good for high framerate, not colour or picture quality. It’s your choice, I will always suggest something between IPS and OLED, never VA. If you can’t do a 21:9 nano IPS, get the highest IPS with Adobe colour rating that you can afford.