Thu, 16 Feb 2012 AOC i2353Fh review

Almost impossibly thin, tastefully styled and finished in brushed aluminium, the i2353Fh from AOC is one of the best-looking displays we’ve seen. Not only that, but it’s fitted with a high-quality 23in panel that delivers excellent colour and wide viewing angles.

To achieve the 10mm frame, AOC has employed a space- and energy-saving LED backlight, while moving most of the inner workings and user controls into the stand. The power supply lives in an external module.

The base of the stand is a circular disc with a flattened rear, where the connection ports can be found. It’s topped with the same brushed-aluminium finish that surrounds the display panel and houses five touch-sensitive control buttons. These are easy to operate by hand, and bring up a large, clear onscreen menu at the bottom of the display that’s simple to navigate. Inputs include a VGA connector, a pair of HDMI sockets and an analogue audio input for driving the stereo speakers.

The i2353Fh delivers exceptional image quality, thanks to its in-plane switching (IPS) panel technology. This allows for wider viewing angles than the popular and less-expensive twisted-nematic (TN) variant, which means that colours and brightness levels don’t appear to shift as you move your head.

Connection ports are located on the rear of the i2353Fh’s circular stand

The i2353Fh produced a very good-looking image in our tests. Our results show that its colour reproduction wasn’t as spot-on as that of some other IPS-based monitors, but it’s nothing that a bit of calibration can’t fix.

The viewing angles are quoted as a wide 178 degrees and we saw no perceivable colour shifts left-to-right or top-to-bottom. This makes the display very restful on the eyes, despite its punchy contrast and saturated colours. We noticed a small amount of backlight bleed during a video’s dark scenes, but were impressed with the overall image.

We measured a maximum brightness level of 225cd/m2, with a black point luminance at 0.75cd/m2. The AOC i2353Fh recorded a healthy 666:1 contrast ratio. With reference to NTSC, the colour gamut was 75.9 per cent and 107.1 per cent sRGB. Power consumption at maximum brightness was 32w, falling to just 21w at 120cd/m2.