AOC has probably got one of the best budget oled ultrawides out on the market right now. It’s the AG346UCD, a 34-inch QDOLED ultrawide under £550! It can produce a stunning 3440x1440p resolution, 175Hz refresh rate, and deep blacks, perfect for single player story driven games, some light competitive gaming, and movie consumption. It’s got a minimalist design, decent stand, and easy-to-use menu. Vibrant colors, incredible contrast, and burn-in protection. It can offer some really smooth gameplay, even with fast-moving scenes. And at this price, the AOC AG346UCD is a steal!
So AOC have entered the ultrawide OLED market with their new AG346UCD a 34-inch QDOLED which means quantum dot OLED which is astounding, given this thing is priced at just under £550 on the AOC website at the time of making this video. Although I say this as some kind of shock, which I can’t really be. Well, I can, but because I’ve recently checked out the Philups EVNIA 6500 ultrawide OLED panel, which again was VERY competitively priced although on sale rather than its actual price tag, I think it’s becoming more of a market trend. These OLED ultrawides are coming down in price and I’m all for it. Anyway, let’s talk about the AOC screen here.
It’s a 34-inch ultrawide QDOLED panel which can produce a resolution of 3440 x 1440p, it has a 175Hz refresh rate and Freesync Premium Pro with a range of 48-175Hz. It’s not the fastest but is more than capable for light esports gaming and your single-player titles. It can produce a VESA Certified DisplayHDR True Black 400 image if that’s your thing, and it’s got some nice skinny bezels to look at, and some tasteful AGON branding, which is AOC’s gaming division if you will and it’s more of a grey colour rather than black. The monitor, being a 34-inch ultrawide is EXTREMELY wide with a 21:9 aspect ratio, an 1800R curve which aids with immersion in that peripheral vision, and the stand is chunky enough to suit. This monitor is extremely heavy, and wallmounting it or even deskmounting, while possible could cause somewhat of an issue just due to the monitor’s weight, so check your brackets first.
The stand as I said is chunky, and also quite heavy and offers little cable management support, but can tilt, swivel and pan, but there’s no rotation here which I think is fine. I don’t think many people will want to use this screen vertically anyway. Around back again you’ve got some quite nice large AGON branding, and some subtle RGB effects. You’re not going to get much in terms of glow from this unfortunately, but it’s a nice to have I suppose. You’ve got two HDMI 2.0 ports, one single DisplayPort 1.4, a USB hub featuring one powered USB Type-A and two data USB Type-A inputs with a USB 3.2 Gen 1 hub speed. There’s a joystick on the back right hand side to navigate the OSD, and there’s not really much in terms of menus to get lost in.
You’ve got your Game Settings in which you can find things like shadow controls, game colour changes, the addition of a sniper scope on screen which enlarges a an area in the centre of the screen to make it easier to kill enemies. Your Luminance menu is for things like dark boosts, brightness and contrast and all that, and finally some controls for your RGB effects. Notably, you’ve got some OLED panel care options for pixel orbiting, a pixel refresh, and things like logo dimming or taskbar dimming which helps with burn-in.
But in terms of image quality, this AOC AGON ultrawide panel is an absolute beast. For colour gamuts I ran two tests: Native Mode and sRGB Mode, and Native did come out on top with an sRGB score of 100%, AdobeRGB at 98%, P3 at 99% and NTSC at 93%. The sRGB Mode achieved a score of 100% sRGB which of course it did, but then it lacked with AdobeRGB coming in at 76%, P3 at 77% and NTSC at 71%. This did not reflect on my colour accuracy test however, where whichever panel mode I ran it in the score came out relatively the same, with the average Delta-E coming in at 1.06 and a maximum of 3.80 which are very good scores, and on par with what AOC provided in their calibration results sheet in the box. But of course, this is an OLED panel after all so I didn’t really expect anything different.
Running a test for brightness and contrast on an SDR setting, at 100% it gave me a result of 240.5 nits of brightness with a contrast ratio of 16,030:1 which is nice when playing in darker environments with little lighting inside of games. When I tested it again with HDR switched on inside of Windows, and with the DisplayHDR setting switched on physically on the monitor too, and at 100% the monitor achieved 278.8 nits of brightness with a contrast ratio of 3,850:1 which was a lot higher than in the SDR mode, but unfortunately, nowhere near the advertised DisplayHDR 400. But because of the nice inky blacks and decent contrast ratio, I don’t feel as if you’re missing out by not using HDR as the difference between brighter and darker areas in certain scenes are astounding anyway. In both instances, my white point at between 6,200 and 6,500 which was really good to see and did not skew much at all with the HDR mode switched on either.
With the colour uniformity of this particular panel though, there was a slight issue with the centre at 50% brightness, and when I say slight I mean extremely slight, with a hotspot appearing though at 100% brightness, the results were pretty much on par, with the centre being unaffected with the increase in brightness, but the edges getting slightly inaccurate, but again, by no means is this really an issue. And then the same with luminance uniformity performing superbly with a slight offset of 3% towards the bottom right-hand corners at 50% brightness. at 100% brightness it was all good.
Testing the AOC monitor’s Initial Response Time as seen on screen measured with the OSRTT tool, it came in at 1.36 seconds at 175Hz with adaptive sync off. However, with adaptive sync on, there wasn’t much of a difference, with the initial response time hitting 1.55 seconds. RGB Overshoot was also extremely controlled as well with an average error of 1.37 with adaptive sync on, and running a UFO ghosting test, unfortunately, didn’t render the UFO characters as sharp as I would have liked as there is no motion blur reduction technology here like you would find on LCD panels, but there was certainly no ghosting with the characters on my testing, and everything did look nice and sharp to the eye, which translated well to faster-moving titles. Sure it’s certainly not the fastest OLED on the market now but having a modest 175Hz refresh rate is plenty if you’re going to be playing some more single-player story-driven titles, or even some light competitive games like Overwatch 2 which I must say did perform exceptionally well. And yes, while I admit I am still running around the Vatical in Indiana Jones, the game did perform superbly and the contrast between brighter areas moving into darker parts of the city looks pleasing to the eye. Path of Exile because of its incredibly dark aesthetic looked really nice, especially when there were spells flying around the screen because they really stood out thanks to that large contrast ratio. And my tried and tested Overwatch 2, as always looked sharp, and the colours absolutely popped. It was a real joy to play games on.
So with this aggressive pricing of £550 for the AOC AGON AG346UCD Ultrawide Gaming Monitor, I feel it’s just a complete bargain for what this monitor can produce in terms of image quality, and yes I notice that I am getting a bit repetitive with ultrawide OLED monitors of late, but my gosh they’re just so good, and this AOC one here is just no exception to that. Its refresh rate may not suit all gamers, especially those chasing super fast esports titles, but if you’re someone like me who enjoys some Overwatch 2 with their friends, and at other times playing through games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, then you really cannot go wrong with this panel at all.
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