AOC AGON Pro 326UD 4K OLED 165Hz Gaming Monitor Review

A Closer Look

The QD-OLED display is nice and large, coming in at 32″ it’s a great panel size to cater to a 4K resolution, as you get great pixel density. Personally, I think that anything under 32″ is wasted on 4K. However, I’m coming from a 3440×1440 34″ ultrawide to a 4K 32″ here. The difference is obvious, as the vertical height is massively increased at the cost of a little width. Another interesting aspect, this monitor is flat, which was a bit jarring for me at first, as the vast majority of screens I’ve used and reviewed in recent years have been curved. It also comes with a uniquely off-center stand base, allowing more room for your gaming mouse on the right side of the desktop area.

OLED panels have a bit of a notorious history of being susceptible to scratches, making them harder to clean. However, this one comes with a 2H panel hardness, and a semi-gloss finish that makes it more resilient to scratches, and easier to clean, and personally while the glossy finish can be more reflective, it has the added bonus of really making the contrast and colours of OLED really pop vs a matte panel.

What’s most striking about this monitor is obviously the OLED panel. I’ve reviewed a few OLEDs but never really got the chance to side by side with an LCD/IPS monitor until now. That monitor on the right has looked black to me for months, now it looks comically bright even on a black screen… It’s amazing how your eyes adapt and accept the LCD after a while, but it’s night and day compared to the OLED and its absolutely perfect black levels.

Still, with modern technologies in OLED helping to mitigate burn-in, the AGON comes with logo protection, taskbar dimming, edge dimming, pixel orbiting, pixel refresh, temperature protection, etc. I leave them all turned on, and they haven’t impacted my usage at all. However, I do keep an IPS panel on the right now for static content such as Discord, email, and procrastination things like YouTube.

The pixel refresh triggers every four hours. You can skip it, but after about 16 hours, it’ll be mandatory to maintain panel health. The screen goes black for a few minutes, then into standby, so if you’re leaving to grab a cup of coffee, it’ll be done by the time you get back.

Peak brightness is excellent, with DisplayHDR and PeakHDR offering 400 nits and around 550 nits respectively from my own testing as this is affected by the size of the bright section on the panel. However, the specifications given to me by AOC are as following:

• DisplayHDR ~400 nits peak brightness, HDR400 TrueBlack, EOTF curved
• HDRPeak ~1000 nits peak brightness, EOTF curved
• HDR Picture ~900 nits peak brightness, internal calibration.
• HDR Movie ~900 nits peak brightness, internal calibration.
• HDR Gaming ~900 nits peak brightness, internal calibration.

The contrast is endless, with absolutely perfect blacks, and the pixel density means crisp details, no fringing issues on small text and elements, and honestly, it’s about one of the clearest pictures I’ve ever seen on any monitor.

Colour reproduction is excellent, and remarkably accurate too, with no colour banding and absolutely flawless detail preservation between elements, both in SDR and in HDR modes. Just remember that in HDR mode, you need to run the Windows HDR calibration to set the black level and peak brightness or you’ll end up with crushed black levels or blown-out highlights.

But overall, from the OLED monitors and TVs I have personally used, this monitor does a pretty stellar job of retaining detail in dark portions of the image, and while I have dimming technologies enabled for daily usage, I can’t say I ever really saw them trigger noticeably, some older OLEDs I’d see a noticeable transition or drop in brightness, but not on the AGON.

Obviously, an SDR compressed photo of an HDR image isn’t going to fully portray the colours, but even then, you can tell the monitor is really pumping out a vibrant picture here. What’s more, in scenes with black bars at the top and bottom or sides, they’re absolutely black, so in a dark room it felt like I was still watching on an ultrawide monitor.