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With its frameless 27in IPS panel, the AOC i2757Fm looks like an expensive premium monitor, but its standard 1,920×1,080 resolution and £230 price are definitely standard. It does have one trick, though; MHL support, which makes it easy to display content from an MHL tablet or smartphone.
The display’s compact stand means it won’t take up much room on your desk, but the monitor only has tilt adjustment. AOC claims the i2757Fm has 178-degree viewing angles, and while we found it has wide horizontal angles – we had to be almost side on to the panel before we noticed any great change in colour or darkening on the screen – we had to be more careful about vertical positioning to avoid any colour shift.
The screen has two HDMI inputs and one D-Sub input for older PCs. There’s a 3.5mm audio input and a headphone jack, so you can pass through the audio signal from your PC, which is useful if you keep it on the floor. There’s no DVI input, so you’ll need to buy an adaptor if your PC doesn’t have HDMI.
The monitor also has Mobile High-definition Link (MHL) support via one of its HDMI ports. This means you can hook up your MHL-enabled tablet or smartphone to the i2757Fm and display your games, photos and videos directly on the monitor, while simultaneously charging your phone. We found we could display videos and games on the screen smoothly and without any lag.
There’s great potential for MHL and HDTVs, as you can control your connected mobile device via the TVs remote, but that’s not on offer here. And it should be noted that an MHL-capable phone should work fine with any HDMI input, though without the charging function.
The monitor performed reasonably well in our image tests. Straight out the box, our colour calibration software showed us the i2757Fm was displaying 96.7% of the sRGB colour gamut – an average result, and below what we’ve come to expect from IPS panels. We managed to increase this to a much more respectable 97.2% after running a full calibration, but considering the cheaper AOC e2752Vq could cover the same range at its default settings (and an impressive 98.1% after calibration), we were hoping for a little more. However, our test photos showed plenty of detail in both light and dark areas of the image, and the LED backlight was evenly lit throughout the panel.
You can control the picture quality manually, too, with individual RGB controls as well as brightness and contrast options, but the touch-activated menu system was both fiddly and unintuitive to operate. Sometimes the buttons didn’t register our touch at all, and at other times they were too sensitive.
The inbuilt speakers perform as you’d expect: they sound very tinny with no discernible bass. They’re acceptable for normal Windows sounds, but even YouTube clips sounded poor on maximum volume.
The AOC i2757Fm may be slimmer and more attractive than the AOC e2752Vq, but ultimately we preferred not only the e2752Vq’s image quality but also its larger range of inputs. The i2757Fm’s MHL support looks useful, but all it adds to a typical MHL-to-HDMI connection is charging, so we’d go with the cheaper e2752Vq.
