Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsIt's "Eh".
Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2022
I'm typically long-winded in my reviews. If that isn't your thing, just skip to the last section as I feel it's the most important. I'm also not overly picky when I like something, but will point out every disliked feature or marketing inconsistency when I'm dissatisfied or on the fence.
- Visual Quality: Coming from an old 15-inch, 1400x900 VGA monitor the extra real estate and resolution boost is great. Unfortunately the bezels on the monitor aren't quite as shown in the product image. In the image, they appear matte and part of the frame. In person, this isn't the case, they're just part of the screen and, therefore, just as glossy as the screen. This can make the bezel in a dark movie scene or video game just appear as part of the screen, making mouse menu navigation confusing... At least it would if 3 of the corners on my monitor didn't glow like a christmas tree - seriously, it's like someone shining a flashlight through your curtains.
- "120% sRGB": To be frank, this is typically marketing lingo for "scam" (Sorry, Frank), and that doesn't just pertain to this monitor or AOC. This monitor does have decent colour portrayal from what I was table to test with hardware, but it was not 100% accurate as the "120% sRGB" would lead one to believe, and blues were lacklustre. Not much more I can say on that, I'm colour blind to blue so it doesn't matter to me, but the hardware I borrowed from a friend said blues were lacking.
- Menu and App Software: The menu buttons built into the bottom of the monitor worked fine for me, it was just cumbersome to use as the buttons didn't have a very distinguished feel, which made it somewhat difficult to know what button I as using. The app software is a massive "nope" from me. I was sketched out a bit by there being two versions on AOC's website (10 months ago), but used a virtual machine to download them for Windows. Both versions had icon designs that looked straight from Windows XP (Yeah, I'm old, sue me), and neither really functioned properly. One never launched and the other stayed as an overlay and refused to close though task manager/terminal, resulting in a VM shutdown and scrub. For those unaware, a virtual machine should run basic software like that without issue, so that was some error in the monitor's software.
- Free-Sync: Just turn it off out of the box, in my opinion. I'm not someone who's sensitive to flashing or strobe lights, but even at a steady 120Hz in brightly lit games the strobing was enough to make me nauseous after 15-20 minutes of running around and testing the monitor out.
- Bug: I tested the monitor on 4 systems, one with an AMD RX 6800 XT and again with a NVIDIA 3080 12GB (and otherwise identical specs), then again on a different motherboard/CPU/RAM platform (with the same graphical cards). On all 4 systems the monitor would sometimes lose picture for a few moments before coming back on during active use, and this is what prompted me to test more than one hardware setup. The loss of picture occurred more on the system with the AMD graphical card (Possibly just AMD's notoriously buggy drivers), but it happened on both. It occurred with basic display drivers and AOC's updated display drivers. I've had the monitor for 10 months as of this review, and I've never been able to completely solve that one.
