AOC Agon Pro Ultimate AG276QZD

Agon's Pro series contains some of their best monitors, and with the AOC Agon PRO Ultimate AG276QZD (they seriously need to find another way to name their products) they show that you can get the best without it costing an arm and a leg.

It's a 27" (26.5") 240Hz display, 0.03ms response time due to the OLED panel, and of course, HDR10 and G-Sync compatibility, all in the standard 16:9 aspect ratio. It also has an eSports stand, which is marketing-speak for being angular and angled away from the user, making it easier to bring the mouse and keyboard closer to the screen. This design is repeated where the stand attaches to the screen, and I have to admit that I stopped for a few seconds and was quite confused that it wasn't symmetrical. There's RGB lighting around this strange asymmetrical approach and it's not my cup of tea. As is often the case with cheaper monitors.

As far as I can tell, the panel is the same LG panel that many others use. It has WLED lighting and a peak brightness of 1000 nits (it's a little under 400 in normal use), and the screen's anti-glare treatment is pretty good. However, it's worth noting that it's a WOLED-based panel, so it's capable of emitting pure white light on its own. Windows in particular can struggle with this, and I think text sometimes looks a bit funny, so probably not the most obvious office monitor. I do wonder, however, that DCI-P3 is only 98.5%. I may have mistakenly assumed that pretty much all OLED panels at the more serious end are millimetres away from 100%.

The default settings are actually pretty good out of the box and I ended up not changing them, I almost always do a little.

I'm a little surprised that there are two HDMI and two DisplayPorts, however, it's only HDMI 2.0, which means that the HDMI input only supports 144Hz, forcing you to use DisplayPort to fully utilise the panel. A strange place to save money. There's no USB-C either, so no KVM or PD. They could do without the two small inbuilt speakers. If you buy an OLED monitor, you're serious about your gaming, and you don't use small in-built speakers in the screen. On the other hand, the cabling is not very optimised, but consists of a plastic connector on the back. This could be improved.

The price fluctuates wildly. A couple of shops have it for £800. Some retailers are selling it for way more, and some at a bit less. Of course, we have a free market, and we must have that going forward, but I think that someone could be left feeling downright cheated.

There are a number of built-in gaming features, shadowboost and the like, but you can also select a reticle from the menu on the back. However, since OLED panels have some burn-in issues, I wouldn't recommend using them for now. There's a real risk of burn-in, and if there's no in-game aiming, there's probably a reason for it.

There is a three-year warranty, but this is only valid if you adhere to AOC's guidelines for using the monitor. This includes using their own panel maintenance software regularly, which is fair enough, but it also says that the screen should not be used for more than four hours at a time, and if that really affects the warranty, which also includes burn-in, then I'd wait a bit before jumping on the OLED bandwagon.

If we look at the pure image quality, it's hard to get mad. Very saturated colours, really good blacks, HDR could be a little better, but I have to be honest and admit that I hardly ever use it, as many games change the colour profile when you turn it on. But the screen is made for fast-paced games, especially multiplayer with PVP or other competitive aspects, or just a game of Darktide or WoW raiding, it's pretty amazing.

I'm pretty impressed with what you get if you can get it for the RRP. I'm actually seriously considering replacing my own "old" IPS screen with an OLED, and the minor flaws that the screen has are somehow irrelevant. If Agon makes a version with a symmetrical base and internal power supply, I'm running out of excuses, because the picture quality is just significantly better than anything non-OLED, and the price is aggressive.