AOC AGON Pro AG344UXM 21:9 MiniLED 170Hz Gaming Monitor Review
Display Analysis
Right out of the box, the colour range on this monitor is god-like. This is the second-highest score we’ve seen to date, with only the Philips 27B1U7903 scoring 100/100/99% just last week (also made by Philips/AOC!) so clearly, they’re top of their game right now for colour reproduction! And what’s crazy is this is just using the factory settings.
Gamma
Grey Ramp
Grey ramp showed the same sort of dip on each test that we see in other MiniLED monitors, this is due to local dimming trying to compensate in this test. However, real-world performance is more accurate and turning it off has the gamma bang on 2.2 every time too.
Very little deviation in the grey ramp too, it’s a little below the 6500K target, but again, that’s the local dimming tripping it up, and honestly, leave it on, it’s only a quirk seen in this test not really in real world usage.
This can be seen here if you look at the edges of the very bright white box. They’re every so slightly greyed where the backlight zones transition, but when watching a movie or gaming, you don’t see this, this is an extreme example.
Contrast ratios are spectacular, with near OLED-like black levels, even with a peak brightness of around 600 nits in SDR mode, and in HDR mode it’ll do 1000 nits, but I suggest setting down the HDR mode from the HDR1000 mode to normal or basic if you’re in a really dark room, you lose peak brightness, but the black levels are even better!
Brightness
Colours
Out-of-the-box colour accuracy was superb, with an average only slightly above 1 Delta-E. I’d normally do a full calibration at this point, but there’s really no need, as any improvements here would be imperceptible.
Monitor Rating
This is one of the strongest ratings I’ve seen to date, and it’s further evidence that Mini-LED has some serious chops to compete with OLED. Tone Response is better than 3.5, it’s just the backlight management doesn’t know this was a benchmark and changes imperceptibly to us, but the sensor picks it up while taking readings. The same is true for luminance uniformity. I did calibrate and tried the Uniformity mode, and while colours were “better” that’s subjective and the score remained at a very impressive 4.5 for colour accuracy (we’ve never had a 5, if you were wondering, 4.5 is as high as we’ve ever had).
