If you’ve been hunting for a killer Mini LED pre-Black Friday, we may have found your best option. AOC’s brand-new 27′ 1440P Mini LED Gaming display is on sale for just $249.99 on Amazon, making this new panel (it just launched in the U.S. in August) one of the cheapest (if not the cheapest) mid-range Mini LED gaming monitors on the market right now.
The monitor in question is AOC’s Q27G3XMN gaming display, which features good mid-range specs like a 180Hz refresh rate, 1 ms GtG response time (on the fastest overdrive settings), a 27-inch display size, and a 2560 x 1440 resolution and a VA panel.
But, the star of the show is the monitor’s Mini LED backlight, which is super rare to see in the $250 price bracket. With Mini LED, AOC’s new gaming display can reach brightness and black levels similar to OLED monitors, which are the kings of image quality. Mini LED does this by squeezing more (smaller) LEDs into an LED backlight display, allowing Mini LED monitors to have far superior brightness and black levels than standard LCD counterparts.
AOC says its Q27G3XMN Mini LED display with DisplayHDR 1000 certification features 336 individual dimming zones. Each zone can be manipulated to turn completely black, enabling high dynamic range content to be accurately produced. On top of this, the display is rated to produce 134% of the sRGB color gamut and comes with color calibration from the factory.
For gaming, the monitor ticks all the boxes you’d expect: 180Hz refresh rate, adaptive-sync tech (though FreeSync is not specified), and AOC’s Low Input Lag Mode. For consoles, the Q27G3XMN can run at a lower 120Hz refresh rate, which is the maximum refresh rate Sony and Microsoft‘s latest consoles are designed for.
We couldn’t find a US-based MSRP for AOC’s new Mini LED gaming monitor, but based on a report from TechPowerUp, the new monitor (without a discount) costs £349.99 in the UK, or the equivalent of over $400. We may still be in the early stages of this Black Friday Deals season, but we’d be surprised to find any monitor with better specs than this selling for less than $250 this year.