AOC Agon Pro AG326UZD2 Review (Penta Tandem 4K/240Hz QD-OLED)

1. Introduction2. Design3. On-screen Display (OSD)4. Panel Analysis: SDR5. Panel Analysis: HDR6. Response Times & Motion Clarity7. Input Latency8. Closing Thoughts9. View All Pages

HDR Testing

Following on from the SDR results on the previous page, here we re-test the relevant areas of the display with HDR enabled.

While AOC includes 5 different HDR modes, we found that the DisplayHDR and HDR Peak are the two most relevant – as HDR Picture, Movie and Game all behave the same as DisplayHDR anyway, just with slight differences to saturation and colour balance.

Brightness

In terms of brightness, both the HDR Peak and DisplayHDR modes behave as expected. HDR Peak hits almost 1000 nits for the 1% and 2% APLs before dropping down, whereas the DisplayHDR mode is basically a renamed True Black 500 mode, and it starts off at around 500 nits, though brightness drops off slightly once we get past a 10% APL.

Greyscale

Overall EOTF tracking performance is also as expected. The True Black 500 mode is generally accurate across the curve and doesn't roll off significantly, even at bigger window sizes, whereas we know the Peak 1000 nit modes do roll off at increasing rates, as a result of panel dimming.

What is unfortunate is that, when I reviewed AOC's AG276UZD last year, we found the HDR Game mode had been specifically designed to deliver a ‘too bright' experience in HDR, in order to get around panel dimming – something I quite like to see. This time around, though, as we said the HDR Game mode is effectively a derivative True Black 500 mode, so AOC doesn't offer any HDR modes that are designed to tackle the panel dimming issue – a definite shame and something I would hope can be rectified with a future firmware update.

Colour Accuracy

HDR colour accuracy is pretty good with either the DisplayHDR or HDR Peak modes though, with both reporting an average dE 2000 of under 2.

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