SOOOOOOOO… OLED again! By the way, I am absolutely loving this at the moment. I’ve seen a few OLED panels lately and I am just blown away by the colour saturation and sharpness every time. And to be honest with you, it’s no different here with the AOC AG276QZD2 27-inch gaming monitor because I’ve had an impressive few weeks with this screen. To get some specs out the way, it’s got a 27-inch QD-OLED panel that’s capable of 2,560 x 1440p resolutions. It’s got a massive 240Hz refresh rate which okay it’s not the best on the market now, but you try running your games at the highest graphics settings while maintaining a 240Hz refresh. It’s difficult. But if you’ve got a rig capable of that then smashing, look at this monitor. It uses adaptive sync technology with a range of 48-240Hz, and is capable of VESA Certified DisplayHDR True Black 400 which is alright, but nothing really to shout home about. Yes, comment now why I’m wrong, I know you’re watching.
Physically the monitor looks alright, but the bezels, especially those on the left and right-hand sides are a little too wide for it to feel super premium. It’s a frameless design which means the bezels are not protruding from the panel, but I think I’ve been spoiled somewhat by some thin bezelled monitors lately and these here just stuck out to me. Okay, maybe I’m being a bit picky, They’re not too distracting while you’re playing games or watching media, and being an OLED panel you’re going to be quite impressed with the quality of the screen to notice them anyway. But of course, being an AOC AGON panel, they’re not exactly at the most expensive end of the market anyway. But hey, observation right? AGON branding can be found on the front but it’s pretty tasteful and doesn’t really stand out either. One big thing about the screen though, which I found quite funny in darker-looking games, is the amount of reflection this monitor gives off. It wasn’t so bad writing this script or playing brighter games, but Ori and the Will Of The Wisps you could see my Nanoleaf lights behind me, and when I was doing some general editing on Premiere Pro, I could see myself. It wasn’t massively distracting, but it was a bit noticable.
Around the back, you’ve got your pentagonal AOC shape where the stand usually goes. I’ve got it mounted on a wall here as you can see, and I really don’t know why these AOC and Philips monitors have these VESA mounting plates. It adds so much depth to the monitor from the wall because of it. Just look at this AOC screen here compared to my old MSI next to it. The MSI panel looks a bit more flush to the wall, and that’s because the VESA 100 mounting holes are actually embedded into the back of the monitor as opposed to AOC’s awful mounting plate. I know I’ve not really mentioned this before now, but this is the first time I’ve mounted one of their screens to my wall. Instead, AOC has this pentagonal shape with some really dim RGB effects that don’t really shine to brightly, or offer any kind of feature say like the Philips Ambiglow monitors. Sack it off, stick your VESA 100 mounting holes on the back of the monitor and you’ll be good. The stand here isn’t anything to shout home about either. It looks alright and doesn’t take up a huge amount of real estate on your desk and has a headphone arm. Underneath you’re treated to two DisplayPort 1.4 inputs, you’ve got two HDMI 2.0 ports, a USB hub capable of 3.2 Gen 1 speeds, a headphone port and power too. You’ve got speakers built into the panel but they’re naff.
Putting the AOC AGON AG276QZD2 through its paces with my Datacolor Spyder Elite, it gave me some very nice results. However unfortunately despite the last tests we ran on an AOC panel, card in the corner, this 16:9 AOC OLED panel came with a few hiccups which to be honest didn’t really affect the overall use of the panel. Still, I did pick up on them during testing and thought it’s something I should bring up. Anyway, looking at the colour gamuts, The AOC AGON panel in its Native mode gave me a score of 100% sRGB, 96% AdobeRGB, 98% P3 and finally, 93% NTSC, which overall aren’t bad scores at all. Moving on to its Brightness and Contrast, the panel gave me a contrast ratio of 13,510:1 at 100% brightness, though its white point let it down, coming in at 7,600 which to me was a bit of an outlier considering its ultrawide cousin came closer to the 6,500 mark. Colour uniformity at 100% brightness was also a bit of a letdown, with a darker spot in the top middle and a hotspot down in the bottom right. Though dropping the overall monitor brightness down to 50% produced a much more consistent outcome though the bottom right hotspot remained. Luminance uniformity was perfect across the board so no issues there, as was Colour Accuracy, with an average Delta-E of 0/.68 which is superb, and a max of 1.56 with no real noticeable colours letting it down so that’s amazing to see.
Running the OSRTT tool on the monitor produced an extremely decent experience when it came to the monitor’s response time. Testing at 240Hz, the AOC panel gave me an Average Initial Time, or grey-to-grey response time of just 0.89 with a 100% time in window which is pretty phenomenal. And again the RGB Overshoot tested, well you can see that there really wasn’t much overshoot, and the average error came out at just 1.33 which again is amazing to see. Though I will say now that the panel is an OLED panel, so numbers like this aren’t exactly far out of the scope of testing I’ve done on other OLED panels, but it’s still amazing to see the trend is continued, even at the more budget end of the OLED gaming monitor landscape.
In terms of the menu you’ve got your typical AOC menu layout under Game Settings which gives you your game modes, game colour, shadow control and all that good stuff. Next is your Luminance menu for your contrast, brightness, dark boosts, gamma settings and all that. Underneath are your PiP settings, and your colour setup, in which I stuck to the Panel Native setting and then Light FX and Audio settings. Most importantly t though are your OLED protection settings which include a refresh, pixel orbiting and a screensaver, to protect your panel from burn-in.
Moving on to a UFH ghosting test which I ran at both 120Hz and 240Hz to measure the amount of ghosting which could be achieved for both PC and console players, you can see that it has done a great job of keeping ghosting to an absolute minimum, with of course the UFO in the 240Hz test being rendered just slightly clearer, but again no ghosting was noticed really on either tests.
So overall, a pretty decent experience despite the hiccups I recognised with the white balance and uniformity of the panel. Some odd design choices with the VESA 100 plate make this monitor a little annoying to wall mount and the bezels are a bit too thick. But in terms of image quality for gaming, and the 240Hz refresh rate? It’s a brilliant monitor and one I don’t think you’d be too disappointed with. I could happily look past the niggles I picked up on for OLED tech, and as AOC has managed to keep this monitor under the £500 mark, it makes it a pretty strong contender in the OLED gaming monitor market.
