Most of the UHD monitors now available are still in the premium category, featuring high-quality IPS panels and prices at £500 and above. But if you’re looking to snare an ultra-high-resolution display and don’t think they’re worth that much, there’s now the option for budget construction monitors packing nearly 4k across. The U2868PQU is just such a unit, offering 3840x2160 pixels and a price closer to £300. So what’s the catch?
It makes economies principally through taking a lower-grade twisted-nematic (TN) panel. This typically means more restricted viewing angles, poorer colour accuracy, and lower contrast ratio; however TN can have the advantage of lower power consumption and faster refresh rates. As it turned out, the AOC the dispelled most of these trends in surprising ways.
Rather than go for glitz, the U2868PQU is a simply styled monitor, with matt black plastics all around and no visual ornamentations. The display bezel is reasonably narrow at 18mm on the top and sides, if rather chunky along the bottom at 35mm.
The monitor includes a height adjustable pillar stand, 60- to 180mm from desk to screen bottom, with tilt, swivel and 90-degree portrait mode all available. You can also use a VESA 100mm mount.
Connections to a PC are made through down-pointing ports along the back box, and a four-port USB hub sits on its right side. Only two of the latter ports are USB 3.0, a small clue of the cost-cutting specifi cation by sneaking in USB 2.0 here. Video connections include DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI and VGA. While the first two should allow full 60Hz refresh rate at native resolution, the HDMI is at v1.4 and limited to 30Hz operation. The DVI input is also listed as DHCP-compliant, meaning its laden with DRM processing technology, so may not be the straight passthrough that gamers seek.
And AOC bills the display as one for gamers, advertising a grey-to-grey pixel response time of 1ms. While impressive looking, the company does not comment on the more relevant overall input lag, which is likely to dwarf this 1ms time by one or nearly two orders of magnitude. It’s also described as a flicker-free design, and in our tests we were not able to discern any sign of high-frequency PWM switching, even at lowest brightness settings.
Overall build quality is perfunctory but acceptable, with a case and stand that feel somewhat budget but up to the job of supporting the panel in front of you.
To set up and control the U2868PQU there is a row of four touchsensitive ‘buttons’ in the right of the chunky lower screen bezel. Like the ViewSonic VP2780-4K (page 85), these are tricky to operate and feel cheap in use. Sometimes they work on first press, while at other times we had to make a concerted effort by gripping the whole bezel between thumb and finger and squeezing.
Performance
The AOC has better than expected off-axis viewing. It doesn’t compare to IPS, especially for below-axis image which quickly deteriorated into black fudge just a few degrees below the normal; but you can at least move to 45 degrees left and right, and still have a discernible image.
Contrast ratio measurement peaked at 610:1 at full brightness, and at a more usable half-brightness level of 167cd/m2 it was still providing 580:1. Colour gamut was quite extended for the panel type – we measured 97 percent of sRGB and 76 percent Adobe RGB. On paper that’s almost as good as the more expensive IPS types. Colour accuracy is one casualty of the budget technology though, with an average Delta E figure of 4.6 recorded, when better displays only rise to a Delta E of around 1.0.
Out of the box, the display quality looked overly bright and very washed out, though, this can be tweaked a little with the help of a screen calibrator. We also saw some faint vertical streaking down the panel, just visible with the display set to a grey test. There was, however, no obvious issue with light bleed from the screen edges.
Power consumption was one of the lowest at maximum brightness, drawing 59W at the peak brightness we could reach of 230cd/m2. But at more realistic brightness settings, for which we standardise our test at 120cd/m2, the AOC had one of the worst power consumption figures on test at 46W. This was only beaten by the 51W draw of the Philips at the same setting, although this is a huge 40in panel using more accurate VA panel technology.
VERDICT
The AOC offers a glimpse of UHD possibilities at around half the price of the competition. In its favour, it has a decent colour gamut and contrast ratio. On the down side, it’s more costly to run, has poorer colour accuracy, and we felt even after adjustment that image quality was behind that found on IPS screens.