INSANELY CHEAP QD-OLED GAMING MONITOR!! AOC Q27G4ZDR Review

If you’ve been wanting a QD-OLED gaming monitor for a while, but just couldn’t justify the hefty expense, this thing might be the ideal choice for you. This is the AOC Q27G4ZDR, a £399 1440p 240Hz QD-OLED! There has to be a catch, right? Well, sort of. Let’s take a closer look at this thing and see if it’s actually worth your hard-earned cash. 

Let’s start with a look around the thing. This follows AOC’s newest G4 lineup styling, with sharp angles and red accents. The backing is plastic, covering most of the rear of the panel, with only a small section of the metal panel shell poking out the top. To me this looks pretty nice – there aren’t any LEDs back here, if that’s something you’re into – although realistically you’re unlikely to see this after setting it up. If you do though, it’s a nice look. From the front you get a thin chinbar at the bottom with a large (for the space available) screen printed AOC logo, and you might have noticed the first cost-cutting measure, the controls. The screen printing on the right shows that these use downward facing buttons instead of a joystick style input. This isn’t the end of the world, but feels a little indicative of what’s to come. The stand is the same one AOC uses for a number of their G4 monitors, so it’s solid, fully adjustable in height, tilt, swivel and, fairly uniquely, rotation into portrait mode in both directions. I can’t quite understand why you’d put one of these in portrait mode, and even less so why you’d do it using the stock stand rather than a multi-monitor VESA mount, but hey, you’ve got the option if you want it! IO is two HDMI 2.1 ports, a DisplayPort, and a two port USB 3 hub, with the yellow port available for charging your devices. 

I should mention that the on screen menu is AOC’s newest style. It’s easy to navigate, even with the awkward buttons, and has all the options you’d expect. Picture modes, game-related options both to tweak the image and to add stuff like crosshairs, and plenty of picture controls. There are of course the OLED care settings which are almost all dimming in one form or another. There are a few other ones, pixel orbiting uses the extra pixels around the edge to shift the whole image up/down/left/right so no one pixel always shows the exact same stuff, and of course there are the pixel refreshes too. To be clear though, I’ve been using my EVNIA 8600 QD-OLED for over two years now, every single day for at least 12 hours a day (I know, I need to get out more. I’m trying…), and even with a full screen mid-grey it still doesn’t have any burn-in. Still. Burn in isn’t a problem you need to worry about with QD-OLEDs. 

As for the panel itself, having tested a whole bunch of QD-OLEDs recently, I can say that I immediately noticed the brightness (or lack thereof). At first I thought that much like Sony’s stunning M10S OLED, this was just shipped in some sort if idiotic power saving mode, and I’d need to dig around in the menu to unlock its full potential. I was wrong. This is it. At least in my pretty bright studio, it was noticeably dim. Cracking out the Datacolor SpyderX2, it reports that at full brightness you get a whopping… 190 nits of fullscreen brightness. Yikes. Most QD-OLEDs offer 250 nits, with peaks up to 1000 nits in HDR mode, so 190 is a decent downgrade. I believe this is also quoted at just 400 nits of peak brightness in HDR as well, which again is a pretty big downgrade. Happily the colours don’t go down with the ship on this one. To the eye this is beautiful. It’s a little less vibrant than usual, although if you stick it in one of the “Gamer” picture modes, that pumps the saturation a little and my god it looks stunning. So rich. Just wonderful. To put that in numbers, that’s 99% DCI P3 and 83% Rec2020, and a cinemaphile grade accuracy at just 0.34 DeltaE average. You do still get a colour calibration certificate in the box for your specific monitor too, which is a really nice touch that no one else offers, and yet AOC still includes it even on their budget lineup. Great work AOC. For content consumption this is still fine, although unlike other options how bright your environment is will actually affect your experience. Still, it’s a beautiful thing to look at, and for content consumption it’s still a great experience. 

For gaming, well as with all OLEDs, the response times are functionally instant, which means motion clarity is stunning. I’d also add that the latency was spot on too at half the refresh rate, so naturally the gaming experience was incredible. Sharp, crisp, smooth, vibrant and rich – it’s amazing. Regardless of the genre, this is an amazing choice. Naturally the fast response times, smooth refresh rate and low latency do make it great for FPS games like Siege. The brightness does affect the experience a little, especially in the bright environment, although in a dark gaming cave you won’t have any problems. I tend to use my QD-OLED at 150-160 nits anyway, so this is fine. All-in-all, this is still one of the best gaming experiences you can have – at least in SDR anyway – and for that price tag? It sure looks hard to argue with this!

There is a catch though, and that’s AOC’s own lineup. The AG276QZD2 is, at least currently on Black Friday week anyway, LESS than this thing. That is CURRENTLY £379, making it £20 less than this, for considerably more SDR and excessively more HDR brightness, and a few nicer touches like a better OSD input method and RGB lights on the back. Why would you buy this one when that exists at that price? Well the key thing to notice is that the QZD2’s MSRP is £500, and this is £400. I suspect that means once this is on sale some time next year it’s going to be closer to £300, and that seems unfathomably cheap. As it stands though, the QZD2 appears to mostly sit at £390 these days, so until this Q27G4ZDR comes in noticeably less than that, it’s actually a little hard to recommend this over that. Still, a QD-OLED – albeit a nerfed one in terms of brightness – with an MSRP of just £400, especially for a 1440p 240Hz panel – is amazing, even if at least right now AOC already offers and even better deal. I’ll link to both in the description if you want to check them out!