Picture Quality

The AOC AGON AG271QG features an AU Optronics M270DAN02.3 AHVA panel. It's an 8-bit panel capable of displaying 16.7 million colors. AHVA is in fact an IPS-type panel, not to be confused with VA panels, which means the pixels use in-plane switching (IPS) to display the picture. The panel's general behavior is also that of any other IPS panel. The screen uses a White-LED (W-LED) backlight. It's controlled by direct current (DC). As such, it doesn't flicker, regardless of the brightness setting.

The screen coating on the AOC AGON AG271QG is light anti-glare (AG). The screen is quite resistant to reflecting its surroundings even when used in a room with a lot of natural or artificial light, and the picture isn't perceived as grainy or dirty from a normal sitting distance, which can be the case with heavier AG coatings. The maximum specified brightness of the panel is 350 nits, accompanied by a static contrast ratio of 1000:1. Let's fire up the Datacolor Spyder5ELITE+, an excellent colorimeter I use to test and calibrate all of my screens, to find out what the AOC AGON AG271QG has to offer in terms of picture quality.

Picture Quality at Factory Settings

The picture quality of the AOC AGON AG271QG at its factory defaults was tested right after plugging it in and allowing it to warm up for about an hour. At its default settings, the monitor has the brightness set to 90%, contrast to 50%, Game Color (saturation) to 100, Shadow Control to 0, gamma to Gamma1 (2.2), and color temperature to Warm.

Before we take a look at various measurements, I'd like to point out that the out-of-the-box picture struck me as extremely bright. The colors were vivid and punchy and the gradients looked pretty good, with a clear distinction between each color's various brightness levels. When looking at a completely black screen, it was easy to spot a bit of backlight bleed in the lower-right corner of the screen. Other parts of the screen looked decent uniformity-wise, although a colorimeter could easily prove otherwise.

It is my impression that the main idea of the factory picture-tuning was to wow you as soon as you turn the monitor on, as high brightness and vividness of colors is what most users perceive as quality. However, I wasn't ready to use the monitor at the default 90% brightness for a longer period of time since I could feel it put a bit of strain on my eyes. As soon as I placed the Spyder5ELITE+ on the screen and took a couple of initial readings, it became obvious why that was the case. At its factory settings, the brightness of the screen measured 421 nits! That's not only extremely high on its own, but also goes well beyond the specified maximum value of 350 nits. I was very interested to know how high it would go with the brightness cranked up to 100%. The answer? It went all the way up to 492 nits! As for color temperature, it was sitting at 6960 K (white point) at its factory settings.


As we can see by looking at the CIE diagram, we get a 100% coverage of the sRGB and 79% coverage of the Adobe RBG color space out of the box, which is completely in line with a standard-gamut IPS monitor. There's a certain amount of over-coverage in the greens and reds, but not enough to lose sleep over.


The measured display gamma was 2.1, with a target of 2.2. The graph shows a slight deviation from the ideal value, which isn't unexpected from a gaming-grade monitor. Considering we're looking at values at factory settings, the gamma graph looks okay.


Measured display gamma with the appropriate OSD setting switched to Gamma2, where the target is 2.0, showed a value of 1.9. The exact same 0.1 deviation can be seen with the Gamma3 setting, which has a target of 2.4, but measures in at 2.3. By looking at the graph, it's worth noting that the Gamma3 setting is in fact much more in line with the desired 2.2 gamma value than the Gamma1 setting, even though Gamma3 aims for 2.4 and Gamma1 is supposed to be 2.2. With that in mind, if you don't plan to calibrate your AOC AGON AG271QG or use our ICC profile (provided below), it's best that you set the gamma value to Gamma3.

These are the measured brightness and contrast values for various brightness settings:


What sticks out from these results is the brightness, which goes all the way up to 492 nits. That's so high and so much above the specified value of 350 nits that I was at first certain something was wrong with my colorimeter, even though my eyes were also telling me that the brightness was extremely high. However, after verifying these measurements with a different Spyder5 unit, there was no room for any further doubt - the test sample of the AOC AGON AG271QG goes all the way up to almost 500 nits. Of course, no one sane will ever use it with its brightness set so high. I don't recommend going above 250 nits for everyday use and gaming even if you like a very bright display. Ideally, you wouldn't go above 200 nits either. Just as a reminder, the recommended value is 120 nits. To achieve 250 nits of brightness, I had to lower the brightness to 40% in the OSD. It's nice to see that the static contrast ratio never drops below 830:1, regardless of the brightness. The black point remains at around 0.5 even at extreme brightness levels - nice.


The first graph tells us that the color uniformity at 100% brightness is generally solid - not great, but solid. However, the bottom-left corner of the panel is somewhat problematic as the Delta-E goes all the way up to 6.9, which is a significant oscillation from the areas of the screen surrounding it. Things do get a bit better after lowering the brightness to 50% (right graph), but the bottom-left corner of the screen still remains the most problematic part. Good news is that the only time you'll be aware of it is when the entire screen is covered in similar shades of a color. In practice, that's rarely the case.


Luminance also varies a lot across the screen. At 100% brightness (left graph), upper parts of the screen are up to 17% darker than the center. Things get even worse after lowering the brightness to 50% (right graph). The upper parts of the screen almost becomes 25% darker than the lower ones. All of that should improve after calibration.


As for color accuracy, we can see that the average Delta-E is 1.08, which is a great score for an uncalibrated display. Remember, you want this value to be as low as possible because it indicates how much a certain color deviates from its perfect representation. I don't expect the average Delta-E to improve by a lot, if at all, after calibrating the display because the measured value is very low already. I do expect to see some improvements in the highest measured Delta-E value (4.8), though.

Picture Quality After Calibration

I calibrated the display by using Datacolor's recommended settings. They suggest you set the gamma to 2.2, the color temperature to 6,500 K, and the brightness to 120 nits. The Spyder5ELITE+ does allow you to do the calibration with more brightness (up to 180 nits) or a value you enter manually should you find that to be too dark. Here are the OSD settings I had to use to achieve those values:


Let's take a look at the post-calibration report:


The numbers look very nice and show clear improvements in various aspects of the screen's performance. The changes were visible to the naked eye as well - we got rid of the slight yellowish hue, especially visible on details such as human skin. When the screen is set to the recommended brightness of 120 nits, the colors do lose a lot of their punchiness and overall appeal, so if you're a non-professional user and more of a gamer than anything else, I recommend you set the brightness higher. When set to 250 nits (85% brightness in the OSD assuming you set everything else exactly like in the table above), the calibrated picture looks very nice. The colors are vivid and pleasing to the eye, with solid tonal balance and gradients. More demanding users are likely to notice a bit of banding (ie. in the black-to-white gradient) and a certain loss of the finest details in deeper shadows, but if you bought this monitor for gaming and normal everyday usage, you'll without a doubt be satisfied with its picture quality.

Here's the ICC profile (download) that was made by calibrating the monitor with the recommended settings, listed in the table above.

The second ICC profile (download) was created after manually setting the desired brightness and related calibration settings to 250 nits (85% brightness in the OSD with everything else left exactly like in the table above). Setting the brightness so high can be uncomfortable to the eyes, but many users simply prefer using a very bright display.

Backlight Uniformity

To give you an idea of the backlight's uniformity, brightness was set to 120 and 250 nits before I took photos in a completely dark room. I did my best to find a combination of the camera's settings that would capture the screen in a way that has it look as close to what my eyes were seeing in real life. Those ended up being ISO100 f8 1/1.



These photos basically confirm what the colorimeter already told us - backlight uniformity is far from perfect and its faulty implementation becomes more evident as we increase the brightness.

Viewing Angles

This being an IPS panel, the viewing angles are great. There's no visible shift in colors when you change your sitting position. You'll have a lot of freedom to move your head any way you like.


Here's a photo of a completely black screen taken at a wide angle. Don't confuse what you see with backlight bleed - it's IPS glow, an inherent feature of the technology. It looks nasty, but isn't an issue at all because you won't see it at a normal sitting distance if your eyes are roughly level with the center of the screen. You are simply sitting too close to the monitor if you notice it in everyday usage.