It's happening. QD OLED monitors have
finally reached a price that's attainable for gaming enthusiasts. I
expected that. What I didn't expect was that the first one to reach such a nice
price would be from a real brand. But
here it is, the Q27G4ZD from AOC, a 27-in 1440p 280 Hz, more on
that later, beast of a gaming monitor
that delivers all of the goodness of QD OLED like perfect blacks, incredible
motion clarity, and great viewing angles for just 420 bucks. To put this in
perspective, just 4 years ago, this would have been a thousand dollars
easily. And if we go back further, an IPS with these specs would have been
priced similarly just 10 years ago. And this is QD freaking OLED.
There's got to be a downside, right? Left side, right side, front side, and
back side. And now, it's time for segway
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$25 a month. Check them out using our link down below. Just what do you get
for a little over $400? Do they cheap out somehow? Handy dandy power cable,
USB B to A, DisplayPort, HDMI 2.1.
Got the base of our stand here. Little light and flimsy, but you know,
it's not expensive. Manuals, manuals, don't need those.
The rest of our stand. The whole thing feels a little flimsy, I
won't lie, but you know, it's got the standard column design. It's got this
nice easy to set up screw on the bottom
system that a lot of them use. My only real complaint is that its legs are
definitely going to jut out pretty far into your desk space. So, wall mounting
could be a good idea.
Nice. Got a little 3-year warranty sticker, huh? 3 years
zero dead pixel, advanced replacement, one-time accidental damage on the one
year. That accidental damage is a big deal actually. Um and we'll be talking
about it later cuz these guys are they're a little fragile. Uh I don't
know if that 3-year dead pixel warranty means also image retention issues or
burn-in. A lot of the other guys do that. That might be the one thing you're missing out on.
You know, it's really not bad. I mean, it's relatively bezeless. They've only
got the AOC logo right there. And other than that, I don't see a ton of like
awkward branding anywhere. On the back, AOC gaming. Okay, good amount of swivel.
Decent amount of tilt and height adjustment. Little stiff,
but that's okay. And last but not least, can it pivot? It can one-way pivot.
It can two-way pivot. It might not seem like a big deal, but because you've got
this giant bezel here, it's actually great that you can go left or right when
you're pivoting. So that when this does become a secondary display, no matter
which side you put it on of your new primary, you know, there's no bezel on that side.
It's great. Love to see it. I'll be frank, it definitely feels like one of
the most rickety kind of cheap stands I've ever used. But
like, you're never going to really notice that while you're gaming unless you're yo,
slamming around on the desk, getting really angry and frustrated. Um should
be totally fine. If you're concerned, I'm going to put it on the wall mount.
Put it on an arm. Let's take a look at the IO. We've got a couple of USB A
ports, USB B up, HDMI, HDMI,
DisplayPort, headphone jack,
and our power connector. Oh, and check this out. I actually didn't notice these
at first. We've got a couple of more USB A ports on the side here. One thing I
didn't even think about until we started plugging everything in, it's got a little bit of cable management on the
stand as well. Look at that. Beautiful.
Really easy to use.
What a beauty. I still can't get over just how incredible QD OLED looks from
any angle. It just pops in a way that traditional backlit displays cannot. And
this is good old-fashioned SDR or standard dynamic range content. And it's
no one-trick pony, featuring both strong color gamut performance in SDR for rich,
vibrant colors, and decent accuracy as long as you're in the right mode.
Though, we would recommend calibrating it for color-sensitive work. They had to
save a few bucks somewhere, I guess. And besides, this is a gaming display, you
guys. It's for gaming. One area where older generation QD OLEDs fall a bit
short of the newer ones is peak brightness. In SDR though, we measured
about 265 nits. Not bad for OLED. Let's fire up some HDR or high dynamic range
content to really see it shine. If you've ever seen a QD OLED before, none
of this is going to surprise you much. But thanks to the individual pixel-level
control of both color and brightness, this thing looks great. And the ability
to turn pixels completely off for infinite contrast massively helps the
image come to life and feel more immersive. Darkness looks, well, dark.
And specular highlights from something like a light glinting off a piece of
metal looks bright rather than white compared to the world around it. You
know what else might brighten your day? We've got new colors for our legendary super soft hoodie, blue and chocolate.
Shipping now at lttstore.com. I'd be wearing a blue one, but everyone keeps
stealing them off the racks. Back to our monitor though, with all of that said,
it's not perfect. We actually encountered some weird behavior in our
testing where in HDR, we're only getting 69% of the BT.2020 color space when we
get 80% when we test it in SDR. It's not so nice. However, look at this thing.
It's the kind of thing that our test equipment picks up, but your eyes are
unlikely to catch unless you're comparing it side by side with a more
expensive OLED. And if you're coming from a traditional IPS or VA monitor,
you're still going to be blown away. And at least the colors you are seeing are
pretty accurate. We measured about an average Delta EITP of 12 in HDR movie
mode and just 11.2 in HDR game, which is about on par with the tandem OLED LG GX7
we looked at earlier this year. It's not on par with a tandem OLED in every way
though. For instance, we hit their claim of a thousand nits in HDR peak, but we
sacrificed color accuracy in that mode to get there. And our full-field
brightness is still capping out under 300 nits. And we're not getting as much
BT.2020 coverage as we expected, but guys, come on. The price though. Let's
game on it. One minor issue that you might have to fix before you can game on
this thing, it's set to DVD mode out of
the box. So, you have to go into your OSD settings,
go into game settings, HDMI, and then
change it from console DVD to PC.
And now, 280 Hz. Remember I said we'd talk about that later? Well, yeah. Uh if
you use DisplayPort, you're only going to get 240. And
you got to update your HDMI to hit the full advertised 280 Hz. But now, let's
game on this thing. Oh, what the There's a little connector here?
When did they do this?
Because this is a gaming monitor for gamers, I'm happy to report that at
least right now, motion pixel response times are kind of unmatched on OLED
displays. G-Sync Pulsar is here, but we'll talk more about it later. Oh, what
the There's a little connector, too? Sorry, I just haven't played Counter-Strike in a long time, and I
love Italy, and it's just crazy how much they've changed it. One of the best
things about OLEDs for gamers is whether you're talking about QD OLED on this AOC
model or you go over to LG with their tandem W OLEDs, your display is going to
look extremely clear in motion. It's using sample and hold, so due to the way
your eye functions, there will always be a bit of blur compared to NVIDIA's new
G-Sync Pulsar displays, but OLED pixels are changing so fast, you can measure
them in microseconds instead of milliseconds. So, for anyone in this
price bracket, this is going to be a huge upgrade. Of course, fast pixel
response times are worthless if overall input lag sucks. Fortunately, it
doesn't. We measured 0.3 milliseconds over theoretical perfect at 280 Hz with
the low input lag setting enabled. And at 120 Hz, if you're a console gamer,
just 1.4 milliseconds over perfect. Love
to see it.
Okay, but I said earlier, there's going to be a downside, right? And jokes uh
side, there is. Aside from our weird BT.2020
coverage, yeah, I've got to say like we're in a bright room right now, so HDR
looks good, but it could look a little nicer. You know what? I'm going to check
if it's in peak 1000 mode. Let's do that. Now that we're in HDR peak,
definitely looks a little nicer, a little brighter. Leon is looking sexy as
ever. Just wait for RE9 Requiem. It's going to be great. Oh, [ __ ] I don't
have I forgot what to do here. You're supposed to run away from these guys.
Oh, man. Yeah. I've looked at Doom Eternal gameplay quite a bit. Without
having the monitors side by side to tell that this is losing a bit of BT.2020
coverage, like I wouldn't know. I I genuinely probably wouldn't be able to tell you. Side by side, yeah, I could
probably see a difference. But like just like this, no idea. I would just be
like, yeah, it looks like a QD OLED to me. From any angle.
Oh, man, and the motion clarity. 280 Hz
with a QD OLED? God, it's fantastic. I haven't seen
G-Sync Pulsar in person. I didn't go to CES this year, and I
didn't see it a couple years ago when it was first unveiled. But over a
traditional IPS or VA display, it's just it's night and day. Even like a 500 Hz
IPS, I'd probably take the 280 Hz OLED, to be perfectly honest. It's just so
snappy and responsive, and there really is like zero latency. And the HDR just
looks incredible. Even if Pulsar is going to be a little bit clearer, you
just can't beat it when it comes to watching content. Because the Q27G4ZD
uses an older generation of Samsung QD-OLED panels, it's missing three key
improvements. First, if you're in a brightly lit room, kind of like our
studio right now, it's going to have a bit of a magenta hue to it. If you're a
goblin who games in a windowless cave like me, it won't matter. And honestly,
even in a lit room, it's not too noticeable as long as there's content
playing on it. But it is a complaint about these older panels that you often
see on subreddits and the internet and wherever else you're looking for reviews
for these things. Next, the subpixel layout is not the traditional RGB stripe
that the new hotness is getting. If you're sensitive to text fringing, which
if you are, you probably already know, this monitor might not be the one for you. Finally, there's the scariest
issue, the fragility. Anything before the newest fifth gen panels are super
easy to scratch. Like I'm talking you accidentally put your fingernail on it
while you're wiping down your screen with a microfiber, not good. It's one of
those things where with content on screen again, you probably won't even be
able to see the damage, but you'll know it's there. And it just kind of sucks.
Trust me, my cat has scratched both of mine.
It's painful, even if I can't see it most of the time. And on the subject of
fragility, image retention with QD-OLED has been heavily mitigated, but it is
still very possible if you run at high brightness and constantly no life the
same games. But there are ways to mitigate that. The bright side of these
issues is that at least some of them are solvable. Text fringing? Try MacType or
better ClearType. Image retention? Hide that taskbar, hide those desktop icons,
hide your kids, hide your wife, set your wallpaper to black, and keep all of the
mitigation features turned on. Okay, you don't need to set it to black, just use
something like Wallpaper Engine to change it once in a while or to use a
moving wallpaper just so that things don't get too static. Realistically, as
long as you're not using this thing strictly as a news monitor, you should
be fine. But the real question is,
should you buy it? Like most things in life, I think it depends. If your budget
was already a little higher, this isn't quite the same thing but
cheaper. However, if you were looking at spending closer to $350, I think saving
up another, you know, 15-ish percent is going to get you way more than a 15%
improvement to your enjoyment compared to an IPS, especially if you're doing
more than just multiplayer games. I mean, it's really hard to explain just
how good proper HDR on an OLED display
looks when it comes to, you know, single-player campaigns. G-Sync Pulsar
is an exception to that if you're a pure gamer who are only focused on motion
clarity for the most intense e-sports. But those are starting at $600 anyway,
which is a very different price point. We'll have the Q27 G4 ZD linked down
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Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, maybe check out the one where I showed off my $670 gaming monitor. As
amazing as this guy is, the bottom of the barrel is looking mighty impressive
these days. Oh, how far we've come.