AOC AG271QX Agon 27-inch FreeSync Monitor Review

OSD Setup & Calibration

The OSD is the now familiar strip across the bottom of the screen seen in all AOC monitors. It’s logically organized into seven sub-menus, and a few of the options are not where you'd expect. Check out our tour below to see where to find everything.

The Luminance menu offers brightness and contrast sliders plus access to six picture modes. This is separate from the additional presets found in the Game Mode menu. More on that later. For best results, stick with the default Standard mode and try our calibration settings detailed below. The AG271QX needs a little tweaking for optimal performance. Of the three Gamma options, 1 is the default, but 3 comes closest to our 2.2 standard. DCR is the monitor’s dynamic contrast option, which is best left off.

Image Setup is only accessible when an analog signal is present. Here you can adjust clock, phase, sharpness, and image position.

In the Color Setup menu there are three white balance presets plus User and sRGB modes. The latter locks out all other settings and is fixed at around 320cd/m². As you’ll see on page four, it isn’t quite the fire-and-forget mode we hoped it would be. In the User mode, the RGB sliders begin at center range, so it’s easy to calibrate without sacrificing contrast. The DCB modes enhance specific colors like sky or grass and are best left off if accuracy is the goal.

Picture Boost is a handy feature that highlights a particular area of the screen. You can size and move it and adjust luminance within to add emphasis to your content. It’s something we haven’t found on any other monitor brand.

OSD Setup has the options you’d expect, like transparency, language, and timeout. But it also has the HDMI and DP version controls along with a volume slider. The default settings are all correct, but if you have a video card that doesn’t support HDMI 2.0 or DisplayPort 1.2, you can fix that here.

In the Game Setting menu, there are three more picture modes plus three user-programmable memories. Shadow Control boosts low-end gamma to help shadow detail become more visible. Low Input Lag disables the internal frame buffer to decrease latency. This option is grayed out in FreeSync mode. Game Color acts just like a saturation control and affects all six colors at once. Low Blue Light adds red to the white point in an effort to reduce eye fatigue. And finally, the Overdrive option has three settings: weak, medium, and strong. We found strong worked extremely well, providing clearer motion resolution without ghosting.

The Extras menu has all remaining options and can be left un-adjusted in most cases. On the right is basic signal information. It will indicate FreeSync operation, but that replaces the vertical refresh rate value, so you won’t know you’re at 144Hz unless you check the Windows Control Panel.

Calibration

The AG271QX ships in its Standard preset with Game Mode turned off. This offers fair picture quality, but there are some performance gains still to be had. The biggest flaw is gamma which should be changed from preset 1 to preset 3. That will firm up color tracking significantly. The color temp presets offer an sRGB mode, but that locks out all adjustments and fixes output at 320cd/m². It also inherits the poor gamma tracking from Standard. We suggest incorporating the settings below to extract the maximum accuracy from your AG271QX.