The AOC AGON monitor family is deservedly popular with gamers, we were wondering what their new 27-inch display knows.

Introductory

Once upon a time, where there wasn’t, there was once a man who invented VA panels for monitors. Good viewing angle, measurable contrast for IPS, tolerable price, what else do you need? Unfortunately, one thing is for sure, fast response time. Although VA is better in this respect than IPS, it is not perfect. The solution remains the TN panel, which is fast, but should have gone extinct for at least a decade because of the great image quality. It’s not extinct, and in fact, it’s just now experiencing its boom in the gaming monitor market.

The AOC on the AGON AG273QCG monitor has forced a return to the TN panel, which, as we will see, has many advantages, but in return we also get plenty of the disadvantages. In this article, we will try to figure out what has more advantages or disadvantages.

AOC AGON AG273QCG - external

Gamer monitors always come with a refreshing look. Admit it with a monitor big magic can’t be done, as a sole, a display and a beef big plastic platinum on the back that can be made up of. Designers need a great deal of creativity to not only make a monitor look good, but to be fresh and different from its competitors. For the AOC, this feat has just come together!

The AG273QCG has become very cheeky! The sole and stand are very filigree, almost airy, yet so stable that it could withstand a minor earthquake loosely without tipping over. The red painting of the sole was a percussive idea, and I really like the way the sole and the stand part meet.

On several AOC monitors, I came across a not-too-sympathetic solution, specifically that the stand had to be screwed onto the back of the display. Okay, though, in a good case, we have to do this once the monitor arrives, but even so, there are better solutions, often even an entire computer can be assembled without a single screw.

Fortunately, the AG273QCG is free from this “bug”, the top round part of the stand snaps nicely into the back, stable, strong and safe. Plus, if we want to take it apart, it’s also just a matter of seconds, we have to pull up a little tab and the two sides snap apart.

If we’re already sticking to things we like, I have to mention the breakthrough at the top of the stand that got an interior cover the same color as the sole. What’s more, this thing isn’t without a role here either, as we get a tab that makes it easy to drag the monitor.

The theme of the base and stand includes adjustability, which has been perfect in this case. The display can be raised, rotated and tilted, only PIVOT mode is missing. Of course, this shortcoming would only be a real shortcoming if we were not talking about a gamer monitor, because there is no point in turning the panel vertically.

There is also something to talk about the essential part, ie the display. On the front, it is essentially completely frameless on three sides, with only a rim about an inch and a half below. The display is curved, with the usual 1800’s curvature in it, which isn’t too aggressive, but the picture pleasantly surrounds us while playing.

In the middle of the top of the back we get a wonderful AGON logo that looks really cool, I hope the pictures will give back how much. Below it is a radial grating in a large circular motif, in the middle of which the above-mentioned round part snaps from the top of the stand. The truvay is not even that, but the fact that we find a gray plastic strip around the nail motif that comes to life after turning on. Below it live RGB LEDs, the color of which can be set from the menu. For me, of course, red (red) came in perhaps the best fit for the design. It looks incredibly good as the light is reflected from the wall behind the monitor, plus we put less strain on our eyes when the bright display is surrounded by a faint twilight. The thing is really very frank!

The control is located in the middle of the downward-facing edge of the coffee. The usual mini joystick is waiting for us here, which I really liked about the AOC monitors. You don’t have to get lost in a spherical forest, the push-in, four-way tilt small arm is perfect enough to navigate the menu. It should be mentioned that we also find RGB LEDs next to the joystick, they light down, so on the one hand there is a nice twilight on the tabletop, too (let's say we see the keyboard in the dark), and if we have to adjust something we don't have to look for ducks.

The connectors are one back and up, facing down. This wouldn't be a problem with an image input, but all the more so with USB connectors. Of these, we find one input and four outputs, one of the four outputs is also suitable for fast charging of our mobile devices. The problem is caused by two things. On the one hand, it is extremely difficult to access the connectors from the front, on the other hand, the 4 outputs are so crowded that it is art to squeeze two of the thicker USB plugs next to each other. Minor design flaw. One more, two more extras, are the pull-out headphone holders on the top and back of the sides of the kava. The idea is good, so is the workmanship until the arm breaks down. It felt a little thin on the plastic, I wouldn’t have minded if a metal hook in the rail had slipped in and out.

AOC AGON AG273QCG - technology and operation

What you should talk about first is the OSD menu. Unlike the monitors I have had so far, the menu here consists of two parts. The main panel appears at the bottom right, but the settings inside the panel are already in the middle. I described this not as a problem, but as an curiosity, this is not how it usually looks. The reason for the change is clearly that the manufacturer has tried to make the menu a bit more different, as we are talking about a gamer monitor. Anyway, it’s easy to use, and as I wrote above, the mini joystick is a great invention, I like it much more than any other solution, including physical buttons or touch-sensitive buttons.

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but we also find two built-in 2-watt speakers in the monitor. The best I can say about these is that they are about. If no one else does, quietly watching a movie is good, but games need to have a rougher resonance because what these little speakers provide doesn’t give you too much of an experience.

The AOC AGON AG273QCG has been given a 27-inch AU Optronics TN panel, perhaps most interestingly, it supports a 165 Hz update. Dithering without an 8-bit color scale, and the point, which makes TN and not VA, is the 1 ms response time.

You can already read above that the panel is curved, with a resolution of WQHD, i.e. 2560 x 1440 pixels. These data are good, but there is little problem with other data such as contrast ratio. This is not the fault of the manufacturer, but the flaw in the technology used, which is why they wanted the TN panel to become extinct. So the maximum contrast (and now of course we’re not talking about dynamic contrast) is somewhere below 800: 1, which we admit is pathetic. Aside from that, the AOC brought everything out of the monitor that it could, the WLED backlight is good, relatively even, I only had a very small minimum brightness difference in full darkness in the lower right corner. The fact that blacks tend to be gray is again the fault of the TN panel, as is the fact that the viewing angles are narrow, when viewed from the side, everything slips nicely. True, whoever is going to play on the monitor is sitting opposite him, from there the colors are good.

Not only do I write bad things about gamma quality above average, for example, NTSC scene coverage is also very good. The AdobeRGB color space isn't so perfect anymore, but it doesn't affect us again, we don't want to design graphics on the monitor, we want to play it, so NTSC matters more to us.

It is also worth mentioning the low blue light reading mode. In addition to the game modes, two offices can be selected from the burned profiles, which will of course be an advantage in normal daily use, less tiring on the eyes. While playing, of course, you can use pre-programmed settings that have been added to several types of styles, such as FPS, simulator, and the like, but just like you can customize everything on a normal monitor. I’m lazy to do this, I only adjust the color temperature, in the case of the AOC AGON AG273QCG the 6300 kelvin seemed the best.

During use, in front of the colors, everything was fine. The backlight is strong enough so we don’t even have to maximize it to get vibrant and brilliant colors. At this level, the unevenness of the backlight does not deteriorate either, because it is so minimal that many competitors may look envious.

The AOC AGON AG273QCG performed well during games and movies. Some delays can be observed in fast motion, and in fast image changes, the image may seem a bit blurry, but the latter thing may have been deceived only by my eyes, and it could not adapt quickly enough to change. Speaking of dragging, it's important to note that the monitor's built-in technology allows you to activate ULMB (Ultra Low Motion Blur) in addition to G-Sync, or more precisely. True, we won’t be able to use this for extremely high refresh, but at 120 Hz we will, and if activated in the NVIDIA control panel and OSD menu, we’ll be rewarded with a brighter, clearer, less blurry image. The other direction of ULMB is an NVIDIA-specific technology that flashes the backlight. The blink rate is set to refresh the display so it can be used in 85-100 or 120 Hz mode. If you don’t insist on G-Sync’s auto-tuning and the maximum 165-horsepower upgrade available, you might want to give it a try, although it’s good to know that we can react differently to flicker, there will be some who won’t get along very well, while others will have sharper, less they may rejoice because of a blurred image.

The resolution of the monitor is relatively high, so if you want to drive in native mode you will need a powerful machine. However, there is a workaround that can be solved by playing at a lower resolution, which is essential, for example, if you connect a console that can have a maximum resolution of FHD, i.e. 1920 x 1080 pixels. In this case, it essentially happens that the image is scaled up to the resolution of the monitor and a real pixel from the game will appear on several physically real pixels. To take advantage of this we need to forget the Display port and use HDMI. But that wouldn’t be enough for salvation yet, so that the image that appears wouldn’t be blurry, the edges would need to stay nice with a good video card and a good display as well. The AOC AGON AG273QCG tested well in this respect as well, in addition to the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti, it gave me a sufficiently sharp, that is, not too sharp, but not too soft image.

Overall, I have to say I was expecting worse. Of course, what has been described so far can seriously discourage you from buying, but in the last chapter I will describe why this should not happen.

AOC AGON AG273QCG - Summary

The title of the article reads: What we gain on the harbor is lost at customs. It’s no coincidence that this hit, since, although we’ve been waiting for quite a few years for the monitors revolution just doesn’t want to come. In the past, TN vs. IPS panel battles went on, by now the VA panels were also involved in the fight. By its roots, IPS excels in good image quality, as its basic goal was to help quality graphic work. VA panels offer a good alternative to IPS, characterized by good color fidelity and good contrast ratio. And the TN panel is, well, as it is. For one thing, though (unfortunately) they couldn’t take the first step of the podium from the TN panel, and that is response time. In games, it’s essential to keep the delay to a minimum, and in that VA doesn’t shine, and IPS is even worse. Because of this, the manufacturers were then forced to go back to the TN panels.

So the point when judging a TN panel monitor is not about the quality of the image, viewing angles and contrast - we know they are not good - but about what the manufacturer, now the AOC, has managed to do with this outdated, but out of a technology with extremely fast response times. Well, the good news is that the AOC brought out everything it could!

We got a nice curved display, an above average quality WLED backlight, G-Sync and ULMB support, an extremely high 165 Hz image refresh rate. These abilities can more or less forget the weaknesses of the TN panel smuggled back out of compulsion for the sake of players.

So the last drops were squeezed out of the technology as well. Fortunately, not only the interior did well, but the exterior as well. In fact, the exterior was really well, so to speak, percussive. I really like the stand and the base, it looks very good with the big but not huge logo on the back, and the RGB LED lighting is also a first class experience.

So, overall, if we want to play on the monitor, let’s not be afraid of it, it won’t bite, but it will pamper us with its many, many features. For me, the TN panel, along with all its weaknesses, has fallen into the recommended category!