AOC 210V

22 inches of loving at a happy pocket price.

We’ve often been harsh on the 22" budget segment – particularly when there are monitors that don’t deliver. Heave a sigh of relief then, because AOC’s 210V is quite marvellous indeed, and we can be nice once more.

It employs Chimei’s CMO M220Z1 L01 panel, so if you were allured by Chimei’s price and screen quality but wanted a better chassis build quality, then the 210V will certainly pique your interest.

The stand is solid, and the screen small enough that all that’s delivered in terms of adjustment is tilt – you can easily rotate by shifting the whole monitor. The not-so-great vertical viewing angle makes us wish we had height adjustment though, in order to minimise the effect of the darkening/lightening screen as your head moves.

The 2000:1 contrast ratio is ‘dynamic’ – which supposedly makes dark colours darker, and light lighter (much like Cold Power), but as with most dynamic colour systems, it tends to screw things up (much like Cold Power), and so we simply switched everything off – resulting in a 700:1 contrast ratio – and manually calibrated.

DisplayMate tests were passable, the monitor able to display the shades from 1 to 253 in the 255 greyscale tests, and colour gradients were excellent except for the green, which started to band noticeably towards the dark end of the scale. Movie watching and game playing was fine – we’d even go so far as to call this the perfect monitor for the gamer on a budget.

The OSD is annoyingly laggy and as a consequence is a pain to navigate, but it is heavily featured and should allow anyone but the craziest video nut to get a picture they’re happy with. Fortunately most people will be able to set the features they want once and never touch it again.

Overall these are only small niggles, and for the price the AOC delivers in spades, and possibly buckets. If you don’t want to spend nearly double the price for one of the amazing Dell, BenQ or Samsung 24" monitors, then this is your best bet. Recommended.