AOC V22

The V22 monitor from AOC uses WLED technology, a potential competitor to OLED. It has a gloss-black shell that's barely 2 cm thick.

Its native resolution is 1680 x 1050 pixels, which isn't ideally suited to watching HD movies, but it's a lot more comfortable for your eyes in general.

Design: built-in webcam and mic


The manufacturer didn't opt for a DVI connector on this unit: it only has VGA and HDMI inputs. On the audio side, there's no headphone jack, but a pair of 1.5 W speakers is built in. If you're demanding about sound quality, they probably won't satisfy you, but you'll be able to fall back on them in a pinch. As for accessories, there's a 1.3 Megapixel with a microphone. The base, unfortunately, allows the panel to be tilted only by a few degrees. Also note that the power supply unit is external. AOC probably made that choice in order to offer a very thin profile. ?

Colours: poorly-designed OSD means you can't adjust the colours

Default Colours

Ideal Colours

With the factory settings, a predominance of blue was noticeable. In our test results, that produced as a colour temperature of over 6500 K in the grey shades. But since the shift towards blue was fairly slight, the deltaE - the average difference between the colours requested by the graphics card and those displayed by the monitor - is under 3.0. However that value, while it's already quite respectable, could have easily been lowered by making adjustments via the onscreen menu. Unfortunately, the near-impossibility of changing a setting without resetting the others to their original state dooms any attempt at manual adjustments to failure. That means you'll have to settle for the default settings. That's a shame, because with a better-designed OSD you could easily have improved this monitor.

In short, if photo retouching isn't your main priority, the colours will be accurate enough. Otherwise you'll either need to use a calibration profile or else find a monitor with more accurate colours. ?

Contrast: a long way from 100 000:1, even in dynamic mode

In general, monitors have a contrast ratio of around 800:1. With the WLED technology, we were really hoping for a major increase in that rate - even something that would surpass the Samsung F2380, which went over the bar of 2800:1. major increase in that rate - even something that would surpass the Samsung F2380, which went over the bar of 2800 : 1. But the values we recorded during our tests quickly brought us back to earth. Not only did this monitor not get past a contrast ratio of 800:1, it didn't even reach 625:1. And when you lower the brightness, the ratio drops to 400:1.

We made tests using dynamic contrast, even though we're not big fans of it. We expected a big increase, but to everybody's astonishment, we didn't even reach 700 : 1.

Responsiveness: a 2 ms screen with reverse ghosting

Once again, we found another unpleasant surprise. The responsiveness tests clearly show that this monitor is afflicted by reverse ghosting. And unfortunately it's very obvious. So don't expect great results with gaming. It's not so bad, however, as to be a problem for word processing or web browsing. That's a good thing, because it's impossible to disable the overdrive via the OSD.

Coloured    Transparent
Average ghosting over ten frames

So in terms of responsiveness, this monitor is barely any better than certain models that claim 5 ms. It's even more frustrating for gaming, because the input lag averages less than one frame, and that's low enough to ensure good performance during a LAN party.

Films: stay at least two metres back if you don't want to see the problems

Your results watching films will depend entirely on the quality of your player. With no help from the player, the quality of the upscaling was low. Staircase effects were perceptible from as far away as two metres.  What's more, light leaks were visible at the upper and lower parts of the panel. Not really ideal conditions for getting the most out of a film.