AOC Q2778VQE review

If you’re only interested in image quality and don’t want any additional features, you can get a decent screen at a good price. The AOC Q2778VQE is the perfect example, offering impressive quality on a budget by dint of including no fancy extras whatsoever.

The screen is initially a little hard to love. There’s glossy black plastic as far as the eye can see and to say the bezels are on the chunky side would be an understatement. It’s by no means offensive, but those looking for a bit of style will need to pay a little more for something further up AOC’s range. Still, the monitor is solidly built and doesn’t wobble on its stand.

The monitor sits at a fixed 95mm height. There’s no rotation in the base, but you do at least get a generous amount of tilt adjustment. The lack of height adjustment may be a problem for some, especially if you value good posture. If you want to raise the monitor up, you’ll need a dedicated stand or a stack of books or magazines.

Fortunately, vertical viewing angles are wide, meaning you have the freedom to move your head without rendering the screen unreadable. Horizontal viewing angles are also reasonably wide, with the screen only getting slightly darker as you move your head to more extreme angles.

Despite being a cheap TN panel, the AOC monitor’s colour performance is credible. We clocked it displaying 98.9% of the sRGB colour gamut, which means the vast majority of colours are accurately displayed. The only real issue it had was with displaying bright reds, which were a little wide of the mark. A low average delta-E figure of 1.91 was acceptable for the money; the monitor could display the vast majority of colours as they should be.

The screen’s contrast ratio of 1049:1 exceeded expectations, helped by a low measured black level of 0.28cd/m2. Maximum brightness is at 322cd/m2, which is impressively bright, if too bright out of the box; we were more comfortable after turning down the level a bit.

Motion blur and ghosting can sometimes be a problem with cheaper monitors, but we had no such problems with the AOC Q2778VQE. There is a slight issue with this monitor’s input lag time; we measured it at 38ms, which is on the high side especially if you’re planning on playing games. 38ms is about what you’d expect from a large LCD TV, and although you won’t notice this lag in normal desktop applications, games such as shooters that require fast reaction times will feel noticeably more sluggish.

The monitor’s onscreen menus reveal a small selection of adjustments. These include contrast and brightness controls and a power-saving mode that drops brightness levels. There are basic image adjustment controls, too, including colour temperature (Warm, Normal, sRGB, Cool and User). Selecting the User mode also unlocks the ability to adjust colour saturation for red, green and blue.

Finally, there’s a function called PictureBoost that lets you select a portion of the screen and alter its settings, changing both contrast and brightness. The size and position of this portion of the screen is customisable, and would be useful on a higher- quality monitor where seeing graphics or a photo under different conditions is important. On a cheap monitor, though, its usefulness is limited, especially when you consider how fiddly the feature is to set up with the monitor’s menu buttons.

The AOC Q2778VQE is one of the cheapest 2,560×1,440 monitors you can buy, and if you accept the practical limitations of a monitor with no ergonomic adjustments and its fairly ugly styling, there’s little not to like. It’s not suitable for gaming but for regular work and web browsing use, it’s perfectly serviceable.