Wed, 12 Dec 2012 AOC I2757FH LED monitor review

There are a few occasions when you have to do a double-take to make sure you weren’t seeing things. This is one of those times. The AOC I2757FH is a 27” IPS panel with LED backlighting and a street price of around £220. That’s an awful lot of screen space for the money and with an IPS display and a matt, non-reflective surface, quite a lot of quality for the money as well. The monitor itself has a brushed metal panel housing the touch-screen menu controls. It sits on a slick stand and metal base which doesn’t unfortunately, rotate or elevate. It only tilts.

Around the back there’s the socket for the power which uses an external transformer – and it has to be noted that the lead from transformer to monitor is a little short. There’s a 9-pin D-Sub and twin-HDMI inputs but no DisplayPort or DVI which is one price you pay for the low cost. The design is ultra-thin at only 10.6mm and while it claims to have an ultra-narrow bezel around the edge at 5.8mm this is compromised somewhat by the fact that the display stops short of the edging anyway. It’s also feels a little cheap and flimsy. The built-in menu is as effortless as usual with an AOC, though only the power button lights up, so it’s difficult to use the touch-sensitive button areas in dim lighting. Finally on the hardware, there’s a brace of tinny-sounding 2w speakers built in.

The brightness is rated at 250cd/m2 which is plenty for most conditions and as there’s no front-glass to confuse matters and great viewing angles, reading what’s on the screen won’t be a problem. The text on a white background is particularly crisp as well, which is pleasing considering it’s still 1920x1080p on that vast acreage of screen. IPS panels used to suffer from slow refresh rates but most new releases have got over that and this panel shows no signs of ghosting or lag in any fast moving display.

On solid colours there’s great consistency across the entire display and solid whites show no darkening in the corners. Colours themselves are bright and vivid while the tonality tests show more definition in the top end of the white spectrum than the black. Even 1% increments in white are discernable, though the bottom 5-10% of blacks are basically indistinguishable.