AOC - 27" Q27G40XMN Mini-LED, QHD, 180hz Gaming Monitor - Black

TL;DR - If you're willing to put up with a terrible stand (or have a VESA mount) and deal with a somewhat bare-bones selection of ports, this monitor delivers great picture quality at a pretty strong price point. Things I like: - The HDR performance is amazing on both Windows and MacOS. While it doesn't come close to my MacBook Pro's display, it puts up a good fight and, for the price, it's hard to beat on HDR performance alone. - SDR performance is good, and it still gets brighter than most monitors in its price range. - Local dimming is fantastic; I don't seem to have any of the issues regarding the local dimming bug; black uniformity and contrast are impeccable. It's no OLED, but there's also zero risk of permanent image retention (burn-in). Things I don't like: - You're limited to 8-bit color at the full 180hz; if you want 10-bit color, you're stuck at 120hz or below for refresh rate. Definitely a bummer. - Out-of-the-box color accuracy could be better. It's not awful, but it is oversaturated. - Viewing angles are merely okay. - The stand is horrid. I immediately went to using an VESA mount. - Feature set is barebones; only 1 DP and 1 HDMI, no USB hub, and the stand is tilt adjustment only. For >$300 I can't really complain, but these are negatives. - It's a VA panel, so ghosting is present, but with the overdrive set to "faster" it's barely noticeable. - No joystick for OSD control, and using the buttons is a little awkward.

Pros, 1. This is a great looking 1440p 180hz display that's great for PC and console gaming, watching movies, watching internet videos and content creation. 2. It's a VA panel with mini led technology so it give a great display for a great price. It's picture is close yo some OLED oanel, but not that good though. 3. 180hz refresh rate with single player games is great. 4. Having Adaptive Sync makes this monitor idea for Nvidia and AMD GPUs so you don't get screen tearing. 5. It's HDR 1200 and has over 1100 local dimming zones do the contrat it great, the brightness is great and the black are good(look under cons). Thus is great for warching movies and HDR gaming. 6. The stand is better than I expected from other reviewers(look under cons). 7. It has a 100 VESA mount for mounting to a wall or using a better stand. 8. It had an included Display Port cable of good quality. 9. For being mostly plastic the build quality seems decent. 10. The response latency is below 1ms. Very smooth. Cons, 1. This is a VA panel so for best viewing you have to be looking at the display at a fairly straight angle. 2. Even though the blacks are good it's still a good bit behind an OLED monitors, but I'll say OLED monitors do cost a lot moe money and risk screen burn in. 3. If you're a competitive Esports and First person shooter player this monitor probably isn't ideal for you. IMO you're better off getting a 240hz non-HDR 1440p monitor which many are of good quality and can be found cheaper. 4. This is a sidegrade from the previous 27 inch budget display. The stand is cheaper eith limited motion, it has less video inputs and the input are slower at HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.2 so the response time isn't going to always be as great. 5. From point 4, some users have reported their Nvidia GPUs can't go beyond 170hz while using Adaptive Sync. I didn't encounter this issue, but my momitor may have never firmware. By the way, there's no USB ports for firmware updates. 6. Even though the stand is usable I'd recommend either getting an aftermarket VESA mount stand or VESA mount to the wall so you don't risk this monitor being knocked over. 7. Last, this us only a 1440p momitor so don't expect 4k out of it. I will say since it's only 27 inches the display seems really sharp. I was considering buying a 32 inch monitor, but I don't have enough room in my desk area, the pixel per square inch wouldn't be as sharp and 32 inches is overkill for my vision. Orher people nay have a different prefer so again may sure you know what you want. All in all I don't regret this monitor since I'm not a competitive gamer and I love the smoothness of 180hz and less than 1ms of response time. I'm using a RTX 5099 which you may say that HPU is overkill for tgat monitor, but my use for that GOU is more than gaming, it's also about upscaling and editing my old DVDs, Blurays, movie files and pictures so monitor size isn't as important as it clearity. This monitor has great clarity.

Many of the reviews are both true and false. Yes, if you take it out of the box and slap on HDR, all of the colors look terrible. Yes, an all white screen is like staring into the face of the sun. Yes, the colors require significant tweaking, And yes, the configuration is very limiting due to all of the software locks. However, with all that said, you can absolutely tweak this display to look AMAZING for the price. I spent about 5 days tweaking and ultimately landed on the following settings to get an amazing picture quality for both gaming, modeling, programming, and every day use: -Game Color 13 -Overdrive: Faster -Contrast: 62 -Gamma: 2.4 -Color Temp: Normal -Color Space: Native -LowBlue: Office -Local Dimming: Medium -HDR Off -Windows Color Management On Yes, that's right - I'm not using HDR. I'm still in the opinion that it's not practical, since it only introduces more compatibility issues with many applications and games and this monitor can't reliably handle the full 4:4:4 signal above 120hz refresh rate. Despite turning off HDR, this combo results in a perfect balance of true to life colors while looking very vibrant. If you don't use the Windows color management, you get reds that look oversaturated, and the LowBlue setting reigns in the panels tendency to get blue crazy. I spent hours trying to manually dial in the color space on the panel until realizing the Windows ICC profile works so much better. Now I'm running at 1440p with 180hz on an Nvidia card without hacking the resolution profile, using display port via usb-c alt mode for my laptop. It's stable using a Cable Matters passive adapter. For Acer users, you MUST use the "Automatic" mode in PredatorSense for this to be reliable. Otherwise, you have to disconnect and reconnect the USB cable on every boot to make the DP over USB handshake stable. If you use HDMI, doesn't matter what setting you use but you'll be capped at 144hz refresh. Occasional flicker if you leave framerate uncapped on a game but vsync fixes that. There is minor black smearing if you look at the UFO test but I can't observe it in real world gaming. Do NOT use "Fastest" overdrive mode, as it is far worse with smearing if you run a high refresh rate. I almost returned this monitor, but the blacks are amazing and colors approach OLED quality without the text fringing issues that most 1440p OLED panels still have today. It is overly bright and has a very accurate colors if you use sRGB color space and turn off local dimming. It's still a little too bright honestly but you can tweak that to your tastes as needed by adjusting contrast. If you don't care about brightness, lots of IPS screens with similar specs for the same price that are much less of a hassle to tune. Pro tip: Install the AOC G-Menu software to tweak the monitor directly from Windows instead of having to mess with all of the settings in the OSD. Disable the auto-startup after you're done tweaking unless you want to setup some macros to change monitor settings, but this is also a great way to work around the brightness issues.