On that front, the AOC AG274QZM doesn’t disappoint. I measured a peak brightness of 680 nits in SDR and a blinding 1348 nits peak brightness with HDR enabled. That falls a bit short of the 750 nits peak brightness in SDR that AOC specifies, but seeing as most cheaper monitors can only hit about 400 nits, I still find myself keeping the monitor at about 70% brightness; with HDR enabled, you should set an in-game cap to keep the highlights manageable and stop your whites from being blown out.

AOC AGON PRO AG274QZM Review: Hot and heavy - Reviewed

Absolute nonsense, all you have to prevent is getting sunlight to fall onto your screen or having it behind you, which is the case with every other monitor ever - that's just unpleasant to look at. Apart from that, HDR is implemented well and really shines in brighter scenes. Whether it was traveling across a dusty desert in Horizon Zero Dawn with the sun overhead, or swinging through a snowy Manhattan in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, there is a richness and depth to the colors and highlights that are more discernible than in SDR. This is likely due to the panel’s ability to output true 10-bit color when HDR is enabled, even at 240Hz. Still, when exploring dark caves in Horizon Zero Dawn, it felt more “dusky” than truly dark. Poor out-of-the-box calibration The AOC doesn’t get everything right on the outside, but it impresses in benchmarks. In SDR mode its peak brightness of 581 nits is huge, and in HDR mode that figure tops out at 1,014 nits – another fantastic result. Those scores mean the panel serves up bold imagery in any gaming or media situation. Coverage is how much of the gamut is covered, whilst volume includes any colour that extends beyond the defined gamut. The AG274QXM is one of AOC’s most recent additions to their “AGON Pro” line-up of gaming monitors. Some of the specs might be considered fairly standard or common nowadays, with a 2560 x 1440 IPS panel and a pretty modest 170Hz refresh rate – much higher refresh rate 1440p options are available on the market nowadays, such as the recently tested Gigabyte Aorus FI32Q X with 270Hz. Then there’s common IPS technology specs like a 1000:1 contrast ratio, wide 178/178 viewing angles; and also colour enhancements like wide colour gamut and 10-bit colour depth that you’d find on most modern gaming screens. That’s not to say any of this is bad, it’s just fairly typical in this space.

Vesa Certified DisplayHDR™ 1000

G-Sync is officially supported, and this display is also FreeSync compatible. The activation window stretches from 48-240 Hz over both DP and HDMI. If you have a gaming console 1440p@120 Hz is available on the Xbox Series consoles, and Sony now supports native 1440p@120 Hz on the PS5, too. Color Setup has a 6-axis color adjustment plus three color temp presets. The user mode has precise RGB sliders that help achieve pro-level grayscale accuracy for both SDR and HDR. The Audio menu includes a toggle for DTS sound processing. Turning this on improves the audio by expanding the soundstage. It also sounds a little less tinny though you won’t hear any serious bass from the internal speakers. The screen can offer the colour enhancements associated with HDR content with 98% absolute / 115.9% relative DCI-3 coverage measured. Also for comparison there’s 83.7% of the Rec.2020 space covered which is very good, and that’s the colour space HDR content is mastered in. This is higher coverage than many other wide gamut screens on the market. There is also a 10-bit colour depth support I’m not saying that the AOC produces bad HDR. Far from it. Indeed, it’s one of the better gaming monitors around when it comes to delivering the brighter highlights and broader array of colours you expect from HDR. But you’ll occasionally see lighting zones adjusting and blooming, and that’s not an issue on even more expensive screens.

AOC Agon Pro AG274QZM review: It packs a mini-LED - PCWorld

The input panel features a single DisplayPort 1.4 and two HDMI 2.0 ports. DisplayPort supports G-Sync Ultimate from 1 to 240 Hz, while the HDMI ports work from 48 to 144 Hz with either G-Sync or FreeSync. USB comes in version 3.2 with one upstream and four downstream ports. The photo doesn’t show it, but one of the ports is meant for Nvidia’s Reflex Latency Analyzer and is color-coded green. To use this feature, you’ll need a supported mouse. Read more about it in our overview here. OSD Features The AOC AGON AG274QZM is a fantastic monitor that’s only let down by a poor factory colour setup. HDR performance is excellent, bolstered by the MiniLED full-array dimming, producing wonderfully vibrant colour and retina-scorching peaks. SDR picture quality is also very pleasing, with SDR local dimming improving contrast beyond that of regular IPS displays.The Samsung Odyssey G7 falls behind in terms of image quality. The MSI uses Quantum Dot LEDs to match the AOC for contrast, but its colour performance and relatively weak brightness levels mean that screen can’t contend with the AOC for sheer vibrancy or HDR grunt. Ports: 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 2x HDMI 2.1, 1x USB Type-C (DP alt mode, upstream) with 65 watts of power delivery, 4x USB Type-A at USB 3.2, microphone in, 3.5mm headphone out All in all it’s a reasonable setup in HDR mode, although the image does look a bit washed out and there are some higher errors in these measurements if you consider luminance error as well (not shown above). It should be fine for HDR gaming and movies really, but isn’t accurate enough for any HDR content creation or professional work. Conclusion Mind you when it comes to motion clarity the BenQ Zowie XL2566K (which is TN) was the winner by far. Performance in the default DisplayHDR mode is captured above, and this was similar in the other modes too. You can see a pretty decent PQ gamma on the right hand side which was pleasing, but there is a massive skew in the balance of RGB in this mode for a wide range of grey shades, especially for lighter shades and white. The average colour temp was a bit too cool at 6915k, and white point was slightly cooler still at 7059k (9% deviance from target). This leads to some very high errors in greyscale on the left.

AG274QZM | AOC Monitors

We should note here as well that we measured a super low input lag on the AG274QXM. There was a total display lag of only 1.60ms average, so the screen is perfectly fine for fast paced competitive games if you need. Console Gaming You’ll notice the benefits when viewing any HDR content, whether it’s games, HDR movies, or even HDR clips on YouTube. A sunset will appear bright, crisp, and detailed, while a flashlight in a foggy midnight forest will appear as a spot of brilliance in an otherwise foreboding scene.

Visually with HDR mode enabled the screen looked quite washed out and a bit too cool in Windows, and as if the luminance balance was not quite correct. This applied in all 4 modes. We have provided some further measurements below of this default setup to provide more information. So for different use cases you will have different needs, and generally we adjust our environment to meet those needs. I don't need color pop and eye candy when I'm writing text in an office; lower brightness even helps me work longer. But I do want it later when I start gaming at home - and I can easily have the lighting conditions required to get there. evernessinceThink about that for a second. You take your phone outside and it automatically increases screen brightness so that elements on the screen are still visible. The same concept applies here, the more ambient light, the higher brightness that is required to keep the display visible. All is not lost though, we can instead revert to some visual tests and provide some subjective assessment and pursuit camera photos that will help capture the real-world motion clarity and response time behaviour. We would have liked to include both of course, but this will have to suffice for this screen. Pursuit camera photos capturing real-world perceived motion clarity at max 170Hz refresh rate