Getting it that way was a bit of a technical adventure though. If you notice the image above, you’ll see that the monitor is in portrait orientation. Unfortunately, I quickly found out that feature is not available on a Mac. If you remember, I was anxious to take advantage of this monitor’s advertised automatic screen rotation feature. Watching video in a smaller window on the AOC improved video quality. I did notice some dropped frames and blocky color splotches here and there. Although the results aren’t bad, but they aren’t stellar either.
In my opinion, this secondary monitor isn’t the best choice if you plan to use it mainly for viewing full screen video. I also watched full screen video via and even. I mainly tried watching various full screen videos through YouTube, like the Promethius trailer you see above. I tried watching some videos with the e1649Fwu to see if I would notice any problems with frame rates. This isn’t a big deal to me, but I thought I’d mention it for anyone that might want to use this monitor for Photoshop work. Regarding colors, I noticed that when looking at my website on my iMac and my website on the AOC, that the Blue background shade on AOC looks more Blue than on the iMac. Text is not quite as sharp and crisp as text on my iMac’s display, but it’s perfectly clear and readable. I haven’t verified this personally though as I don’t have a Windows machine to test.
At first I thought this might be a Mac only issue, but apparently you can’t adjust the brightness under Windows either. Note, there is no way to adjust the brightness. The picture is bright and clear, with rich colors. This monitor makes a great side display to park my Hootsuite Twitter client.
Grrrrr… Off to Google for a quick search and soon learned that I had to download and install a DisplayLink driver. Hmmmm… So I inserted the included driver CD into my iMac and all I found was a Windows driver. Just the USB cable.īecause the box said the AOC was plug and play for PCs and Macs, I went straight to my system design prefs and pressed the detect monitors button. There’s no power cord and no video cable needed. I suppose that if your computer has lower powered ports that you’ll need to use both connectors. All you do is connect one end of the mini USB cable to the connector on the monitor and one of the other ends (it’s a Y cable with 2 connectors) to a powered USB port. Cool.Ĭonnecting the monitor to your computer (in my case a 27″ iMac) is a no brainer. Supposedly the monitor will detect that it’s been rotated and will automatically turn the image without having to go into the video settings. This is the orientation that I was most looking forward to using. Here we see the monitor in portrait mode.