If you’re buying a monitor on Black Friday, go ultrawide and thank me later

It’s that time of year again. The time of year we all lose collective control and throw our wallets about like our lives depend on it. It’s Black Friday. Or rather it’s “Black November.” It’s good and bad that you’re no longer required to enter into the arena of combat known as hitting up your local big-box store to get your hands on the bargains. But Black Friday is misleading, it’s not just a day anymore.

In any case, Black Friday still has its place, and for tech enthusiasts especially, it’s the best time of year to upgrade your gear and save a few bucks in the process. PC folks especially are spoiled for choice, and I’m here to talk about ultrawide monitors, specifically.

There are a lot of great Black Friday deals on gaming monitors and the like, but if you are buying, you should buy ultrawide. I did, and I can’t go back.

Ultrawide or bust

I’ve only recently made the jump to an ultrawide monitor, taking advantage of an early Black Friday deal myself — specifically the electriQ 43-inch curved monitor. For years now I’ve been using at least two monitors on my desk, sometimes three. While I loved the additional screen space these monitors gave me for my workflow, there were more negatives than positives.

For one, I had to use two or three power outlets and two or three DisplayPort/HDMI cables from my PC. So I had fewer available outlets for additional hardware, like my consoles or even my laptop charger, as well as increased cable mess under my desk. Multiple monitors are fairly easy to set up, but no matter how thin the bezels, there’s always a join, and whether I use a multi-monitor stand or not, my desk has been completely filled.

Colleagues here at Windows Central have raved about ultrawide monitors in the past, and so as it’s the deal-hunting season and I’m in the middle of my fifth office re-organization of the year, I took the plunge.

Within about three minutes I knew that it would be impossible to go back.

It’s just the best for gaming or working

Not all ultrawides are the same, but increasingly they’re designed to be good at gaming as well as being a regular PC monitor. You also have a much wider choice of curved ultrawide monitors than you might have even a couple of years ago. Curved is definitely the way forward, especially as you start to go beyond 21:9 into ratios like 32:10, as I have, on larger monitors.

Some curves are steeper than others, but even the gentler ones suck you into whatever is in front of you. It wraps around you like a little cocoon of PC loveliness. For working, the benefits are obvious. You have so much more space to have multiple windows open without having to alt-tab between them, which is the only reason I ever used multiple monitors in the first place.

For creatives, too, ultrawides are perfect. Why squint at a tiny timeline in Adobe Premiere when you could stretch it out across a 49-inch super ultrawide display? When it comes to screen space, you can never have too much. And by going ultrawide over multiples you only have one thing on your desk. Your work and your workspace alike are less cluttered.

More and more of today’s PC games natively support ultrawide resolutions as well. It’s not a case of the regular image just getting stretched; it’s like when you see a movie in IMAX. You get more.

If you’re playing a shooter or an open-world game especially, the added field of view you get without having to mess about with sliders is unreal. Just check out the clip above of Destiny 2 to see what I mean. I’ve been (finally) playing Control and it just feels better and more immersive playing it on an ultrawide.

It truly is one of those experiences that you try once and never go back from.

NOW is the time to buy

There are some amazing deals already out in the wild on ultrawide monitors and there could still be more to come before the end of Cyber Monday. Generally, Black Friday (day or month) is still the best time of the year to get the biggest discounts, and this is certainly the best chance to get the upgrade of your dreams before the holidays.

That forthcoming Halo Infinite campaign would look lovely on a big ultrawide monitor. Just sayin’.