Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/5469/aoc-i2353ph-ips-for-a-nice-low-price



First Impressions, Design, and Specifications

For most people seeking accurate color reproduction and wide viewing angles, IPS has been the screen technology of choice for years now. The main issues against IPS have typically been response time for gamers, a higher black level than VA technologies, and more prominently cost. More and more vendors have been introducing e-IPS displays, which is a more transparent version of IPS that allows for the use of lower powered backlights, lowering the cost to consumers. The tradeoff is that this does have a negative effect on contrast shifts in the panel when viewed at an angle, though color shifts still are not present.

The other change is that many of these e-IPS panels have actually been 6-bit panels with Advanced Frame Rate Control. Much like a TN panel, it can’t produce a full 8-bits of dynamic range for each color and instead for shades that it cannot produce it will cycle between two different shades that would result in the desired shade. For some people this effect isn’t visible and they will gladly take the benefits of IPS for this side effect, but for graphics professionals the lack of true color resolution makes it a side effect they can’t live with.

There was a bit of chatter this past fall when AOC introduced the i2353 display, which is an LED backlit IPS panel with an MSRP under $200. Had the prices of IPS panels and components finally fallen to the point where they would be able to start forcing companies to transition to them away from TN for their affordable monitor lines? To find out if the AOC monitor was still able to offer a good level of performance at this price point we requested a review sample, which they quickly provided.

Once the AOC was unpacked from its box and upright on its integrated stand, I have to say I thought it looked pretty good. They’ve used the LED backlighting to create a very nice, thin display with a plastic trim that looks like brushed aluminum. The integrated stand contains a Dsub input, dual HDMI inputs, and a headphone output. At first I couldn’t even see the buttons for power and the OSD, which are barely labeled on top of the base, but I eventually located them. The feeling of the buttons is not really one of high quality, as you seem to need to press in on the entire base to trigger them, but they were responsive overall.

The downside to this setup is the lack of flexibility in ergonomic adjustments, as well as mounting options. The integrated base offers only a tilt control for the display, and that itself is very tight and hard to adjust. This integrated base also means that there are no VESA mounting holes on the display itself. There are your standard 100mm VEGA holes on the bottom of the base, and as you can fold it to lay perfectly flat with the monitor, this would allow you to still mount it to the wall; however, it would still make an aftermarket stand with height and other adjustments an impossibility.

A welcome touch is that both the bezel and screen are a matte finish so I had no real issues with glare from the lights in my room. The very edge of the bezel does reflect a bit of light, but overall it was much better than many other monitors. On the whole, I really liked the design of the AOC as it looked very nice on my desk, and the level of adjustment was in line with other models in the price range. From a purely superficial perspective, the AOC looks like a good choice for a mainstream LCD.

AOC i2353Ph
Video Inputs 1x Dsub, 2X HDMI
Panel Type eIPS, 6-bit + AFRC
Pixel Pitch 0.265mm
Colors 16.7 million
Brightness 250 nits
Contrast Ratio 1000:1
Response Time 5ms GTG
Viewable Size 23"
Resolution 1920x1080
Viewing Angle 178 H/178 V
Backlight LED
Power Consumption (operation) 45 Watts Maximum
Power Consumption (standby) 0.1 Watt
Screen Treatment Matte
Height-Adjustable No
Tilt Yes (-4 to 14 degrees)
Pivot No
Swivel No
VESA Wall Mounting Yes
Dimensions w/ Base (WxHxD) 21.6" x 15.3" x 7.3"
Weight 5.5 lbs.
Additional Features Headphone Jack, 2 x 2W speakers
Limited Warranty 3 Years
Accessories VGA cable, PSU and power cable, CD with drivers and software
Price Online for $190 (as of 1/24/2012)

Viewing angles were also good on the AOC as you can see in the gallery below. At the very edges you start to lose some contrast, but colors remain very good and no one is likely to work at the angles where those shifts start to appear anyway.



OSD and Initial Readings

The OSD for the AOC does a good job and has all the controls available that you need. In making my initial settings and measurements, I noticed that the selection of the sRGB color setting really reduces the level of light output from the display. Since the sRGB standard calls for a specific level of light (120 nits), this is actually a reasonable thing to do as pushing the backlight level to be really high can cause color shifts on displays. From the OSD I was able to configure everything I needed for the display, including a single custom white balance control that I used later to set the 100% white value as close to D65 as possible.

For the AOC review, I made a couple of changes to the equipment used for reviews. I have added a new i1Pro spectrometer to my testing equipment, and so it will now be used for all monitors reviews I do going forward. This meter has also recently been tested in the NIST approved lab by SpectraCal to ensure that it has an average dE of only 0.4 and a maximum dE of 1.0 across the color spectrum. Spectrometers are also much less susceptible to drifting over time than a tristimulus meter (e.g. the i1Display2) would be.

The downside of the i1Pro is that it does not do a wonderful job with low light levels (below 20% stimulus), and so for the dark uniformity and brightness uniformity measurements I will continue to use my i1Display Pro meter instead. The color accuracy might not be as good as the i1Pro, but the light level readings are better for these tests. Hopefully in the future I will be able to profile the i1Display Pro using the i1Pro, which would provide the accuracy of the i1Pro with the speed and low light handing of the i1Display Pro. Because of these changes some of these dE readings might look better, or worse, than you would expect, but these new numbers will be more accurate going forward.

Color Tracking -  XR Pro, Xrite i1D2 and XR i1DPro

Uncalibrated, the AOC has a dE of right around 5 in the sRGB mode. This number looks very good compared to other monitors, but remember we are using newer, more accurate test equipment and the only other display on the chart measured with this is the HP LA22f. The worst part of the uncalibrated result is that the largest error occurs with pure white, which you are likely to have on your screen a fair amount of the time. Overall, however, this is a good number to see. Hopefully the calibration can further improve on this, but starting out at a dE of 5 is very nice.



Calibration and Results

Of course, once we use ColorEyes Display Pro to calibrate the AOC, we would expect even better results than we got out of the box. As usual, we set a white point target of D65, a gamma of 2.2, minimum black level, and a white level of 200 nits. I then checked the quality of the calibration using the Gretag Macbeth color checker chart. Often you will see display reviews that use the calibration target points to see the quality of the calibration. That gives you a good indicator of how well the software and hardware was able to hit those targets, but unfortunately no idea if only those targets improved, or if other colors were improved as well. Using the Gretag Macbeth swatches, which are designed to mimic common colors in the real world, gives you a better idea of the overall quality of the calibration instead of the quality of those specific targets.

Color Tracking -  XR Pro, Xrite i1D2 and XR i1DPro

Here we see that the AOC calibrated down to an average dE of 1.64, which is pretty common. When I looked at the results some more, I got a little curious and also decided to see what the median color error was for all the displays. The Gretag Macbeth color checker includes some shades of blue that are at the very edge of the sRGB colorspace, or totally out of it in the case of one sample. In these cases if the display can’t reproduce those shades, the average dE for it might be thrown way off, but the median dE could still be very low since it does a very good job with the colors it can reproduce.

Color Tracking -  XR Pro, Xrite i1D2 and XR i1DPro

Looking at the results, we can see that the AOC has a much lower median dE than some monitors that produce a lower average dE. When we get to the color gamut data later in the review, we will see that the AOC has a smaller than average gamut, which is leading it to have larger than average errors for color samples on the edge of the sRGB colorspace. In effect, the conclusion we can pull from this is that the AOC can’t produce as many colors as other reviewed displays, but for those that it can produce it does so more accurately. Results like this are why you can’t just look at a lower dE and assume that a display will automatically be better than another display with a higher dE, as it’s just a single number that only tells part of the story.

For people that might use the AOC for press work, or prefer a dimmer display in a dark room like myself, I also calibrated the display to 100 nits of brightness and then took another set of readings.

Color Tracking -  XR Pro, Xrite i1D2 and XR i1DPro

The numbers for 100 nits are almost identical to those for 200 nits. The grayscale is good, and the large errors are all contained in shades of blue, as we would expect.



Uniformity and Contrast

The dE numbers for the AOC have looked good so far, but all of those are for the center of the screen, where backlighting should be the most even and the image should be at its best. To make sure the monitor will give a good overall experience, we also take a set of 9 measurements across the screen using the Gretag Macbeth color chart and see how it does.

LCD Color Uniformity

The color uniformity across the monitor is surprisingly very good, with very little deviation across any of the colors. The grayscale doesn’t perform quite as well, with the center having an average dE below 1, but a couple other measurements hovering in the range of 2-3 dE. Even the two worst locations still maintained an average dE of 2.55 or less, and the majority of all the results were below 2.0 dE. Overall it has very uniform color across the display.

Since LCD panels are all lit by their backlight to provide color, any errors across the screen can often be traced back to a backlighting system that is uneven and causing those color shifts. As we look at the brightness level across the display when the center is set for 200 nits, we see the drop-off at the bottom of the screen. If the LCD panel itself is behaving the same no matter the location on the screen, the different amounts of light can easily cause the shifts in color that we saw in the last test. Here the locations that had the worst dE uniformity also have the worst brightness uniformity, which is likely the root of the problem.

Once we have found the issues with the brightness, we check to see how well the backlighting system handles darkness across the display. With the AOC there seems to be significant light leakage in the corners of the display, with black levels that are very, very high for the display. I’ve recently seen LED backlit models with good control of the backlight that can get down to very low black levels, but the black levels in the AOC remain high. Some of this is due to the IPS panel, which typically has higher black levels than other panel types. It also could be an area where corners had to be cut to make the aggressive price point that AOC targeted. Regardless of why, the absolute black level is not going to please people that are adamant about deep, dark blacks.



Peak Levels, Contrast, and Color Gamut

The brightness uniformity of the AOC was overall good, but just how bright can the AOC go? With it set to user mode, and the backlight raised all the way up, I only managed to get 233 nits out of the display with a solid white screen. Since it is a matte surface and not glossy, reflections should not be a big issue and this level of light should be more than enough for most people. Unless you have direct sunlight on your display I don’t think most people would need more light output than it provides.

Turning the backlight all the way down left us with 72 nits of light output, which lets us know we can turn the display down enough for print work, or a completely dark environment, without having an image that is too bright for what we are working on.

White Level -  XR Pro, Xrite i1D2 and XR i1DPro

After the black uniformity tests, I was a little bit worried about what the minimum black levels would be, and it looks like I was correct on that. With the backlight set to maximum, and pure black screen gave us 0.342 nits of light, which is pretty bright for a black screen. Lowering the backlight all the way down to minimum took the black level down to 0.105 nits, which is still high. This is similar to the last eIPS display that came past my desk (The Dell U2311H), and we discussed that black levels are an area that IPS still needs to work on. For comparison, the recent VA panels from BenQ with an LED backlight have a black level at maximum brightness, 0.066 nits, that is still far lower than the AOC can put out with the backlight level at minimum. If deep, rich black is important to you, you probably will want to look at an option other than the AOC, or even IPS altogether.

Black Level - XR Pro, Xrite i1D2 and XR i1DPro

Once I saw the black levels, I had a feeling that the contrast levels were going to leave something to be desired. Looking at what the AOC can produce, we can’t quite hit 700:1 for the contrast ratio with the backlight at high or low power. This isn’t really surprising given the price point of the AOC, and the use of an IPS panel.

Contrast Ratio -  XR Pro, Xrite i1D2 and XR i1DPro

As we discussed in the calibrated results section, the color gamut on the AOC is a bit smaller than the sRGB colorspace. When we measure against the AdobeRGB colorspace, we expect to see a monitor be able to reproduce around 71% of that if it is sRGB capable, but with the AOC we only saw 67.7% coverage. This is what is leading to the larger average dE error, as it can’t produce some of the colors we are looking for, but it still has a lower median dE since it does a good job with the colors it can produce.

LCD Color Quality



Gaming and Power Use

IPS has never been the first choice for people when it comes to gaming due to slower reponse times than a TN display, but some recent eIPS panels have done a better job at bringing these numbers down. With the AOC, I saw just over 15ms of lag, which is just about 1 frame of lag at 60Hz. In my general gaming use I had no issues with this, but people that are very serious and want as little lag as possible will likely have to look elsewhere.

Processing Lag Comparison (By FPS)

Finally we take a look at the power usage for the AOC using our Kill-a-Watt meter and with the backlight at both maximum and minimum values. The numbers for the AOC line up with previous eIPS panels of the same size well, which is what we expect to see. The peak power usage compared to the Dell U2311 is less, but since the peak light output level is also lower, that is not a surprise at all. The light output at the minimum backlight level is also lower, yet the power use is the same, so the AOC seems to be not quite as efficient as the Dell.

LCD Power Draw (Kill-A-Watt)



eIPS: A Viable Budget Alternative to TN

I was quite pleased to see that IPS monitors are coming way down in price to where I can recommend them even to friends that are very budget conscious on their displays. I’ve been using a Dell FPW2005 IPS display for years now (and no longer want to recall how much I paid for it when it came out), but it has been a pleasure to work on since I got it. That you can now buy a display with higher resolution, lower lag, and more power efficient backlighting for less than half the price is a very good direction for displays.

In terms of performance, the AOC comes down right in the middle of the road. The lag is a little bit too high for hard core gamers, though I found it to be acceptable for casual gaming myself. The color gamut is also probably too limited for people that need it for editing photos professionally, as it can’t quite encompass the full sRGB colorspace, though the average and median Delta E values were more than acceptable. However, as a general purpose monitor for doing work I found the AOC to do a very good job of that. The matte screen means you won’t be dealing with reflections in a lit room, but you will be limited on adjustments due to the design of the stand.

For the price (currently $190 shipped online as I write this), the AOC is a good deal in my book. Users with specialized needs will want to look elsewhere, but those who are just after an affordable, well performing, general use monitor (or a secondary display) should go ahead and give it a look. It won't rival the color quality of the high-end displays, but it's definitely a step up from many inexpensive TN-based LCDs. If you've been looking for a good alternative to TN that won't break the bank, eIPS is the current best option.

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