AOC Q27G4SDR Review – Confusing yet AMAZING 360 Hz QD-OLED

This bad boy is AOC’s Q27G4SDR, a 27 inch, 360 hertz, 1440p QD-OLED, and it confuses me. Let me explain. I’ll say this up front, this is an amazing bit of kit. Genuinely. For gaming, this is incredibly hard to beat. Let’s start with a little tour. From the outside this can pretty easily be confused for the Q27G4ZD(R), the 240Hz sibling to this SDR. This sports AOC’s typical G4 styling, that being red accents on an otherwise grey plastic (and metal panel backer) body. There aren’t any RGB LEDs here, just a typical gamer aesthetic which is nice enough, and of course a fully adjustable stand. Everything from height and swivel, to tilt and rotation for portrait mode is included as you’d expect. IO is two HDMI ports, one DisplayPort, and a two port USB 3 hub with the yellow port for charging your devices. As for the on screen menu, that’s controlled with the annoying underslung buttons, but it otherwise pretty standard, including all the typical OLED care settings. 

As for the panel, well that’s really where all the magic is. This is a 27 inch, 360 hertz, 1440p quantum dot OLED panel, and man does it look good. For watching movies, TV and YouTube, this is brilliant. It’s vibrant, rich and colours just look so damn good. It isn’t quite as bright as you might like, but even in my bright studio it’s decent enough. To put some numbers to those words, my SpyderX2 reports 99 percent of the DCI P3 spectrum, and 83 percent of the Rec2020 colour space. Accuracy is spot on with a crazy good average DeltaE of just 0.51, and as always there’s a colour calibration report included in the box for you too. Brightness though, that’s the usual sticking point for OLEDs. Happily, unlike the ZDR, this one has ‘full’ brightness. That is only 240 nits in SDR, but it is like 50 nits higher than the ZDR and a match for all the other QD-OLEDs I’ve tested. And, unlike WOLEDs (including the new tandem OLEDs, video in the cards above), there isn’t an adaptive brightness limiter here cutting usable brightness down.

As you might expect with an OLED, response times (tested with my very own open source response time tool, available at OSRTT.com by the way, link in the description) are functionally instant. This is exactly what you want to see for gaming – although I did find a weird behaviour specifically when going to full white. Here’s the light data from OSRTT, where it hits the right level, drops back down for a whole frame, then jumps to close to the right level and then slowly trickles UPWARDS over the next 100 milliseconds. This is the first inverted ABL I’ve seen! This only happens at full white, and I suspect only fullscreen too, and doesn’t affect real-world performance. It’s just weird. As for latency is spot on too, which means the gaming experience is incredible. It’s ludicrously smooth and responsive – even more responsive than the ZD, the 240Hz version of this, although I wouldn’t say perceptably so. It’s a damn good gaming experience though – for all genres of games. Everything from high paced FPS games to scenic story games, it just works. 

So, if this thing is so great, what’s so confusing about it? Well, in short, this monitor itself is currently selling for £500. Now that doesn’t sound bad for a 360 hertz 1440p QD-OLED, right? Except AOC themselves sell a 280 hertz QD-OLED (the AG276QZD2) at just £380 right now (actually it seems to have jumped back to £430 for now, but is very regularly sub-£400). You get a near equal panel for up to £120 less? Sure, it’s 280 hertz versus 360 hertz, but if you want higher hertz, the AG276QKD2 is a whopping 500 hertz and is just £50 more than this one. Why would you ever buy this when AOC THEMSELVES offer two arguably BETTER options for either considerably less money, or just 10 percent more for a much better refresh rate. That’s what’s confusing here. If this was a lot closer in price to the QZD2, that’d be fine. It’d be a fair fight. But up to £120 more? Nahhhhhhh. I think despite this being a good, better, best situation, I’d either go with good or best personally. That’s what’s confusing. Still, it’s an amazing monitor, and for the right price it will happily serve as the near perfect gaming monitor.