First Looks: AOC e2051F – Stylish Simplicity

First Looks: AOC e2051F – Stylish Simplicity

A Display that Gets Out of Your Way

Taking a look through AOC’s monitor lineup reveals that the Taiwan-based monitor manufacturer focuses on making its products occupy as little space as possible. The monitors across their three product categories clearly show a minimalist design philosophy, especially in their Ergonomic class, where you will find the simple and slim e2051F.

Featherweight 

Taking it out of the box, I was taken aback at how light it was. The monitor is so thin (just 10.6mm at its thinnest point), it felt as if it were barely there. Unboxing a monitor usually involves a good amount of shoving and heaving, but the e2051F’s scant 3.25kg weight allowed it to slip right out of the box. It comes with a round plastic base, which apparently you can opt not to attach, as the monitor’s neck can act like the kickstand for a picture frame, with the display’s “chin” resting on your desk.

The monitor’s light weight is brought by its use of LED technology and its tightly sandwiched plastic construction, which feels a lot less flimsy as you’d think. The back panel is sparse, featuring just a D-sub and DVI port, since its native resolution is just below full HD at 1600 x 900 pixels. Its On-Screen Display or OSD, also follows AOC’s minimalist theme with its simple icons and clean text, which you navigate using a small row of touch sensitive buttons on the lower right hand of the bezel. We noticed that pressing the navigation buttons allows you to cycle through the different EcoModes, without having to dive into the menu. The modes are (from the brightest to the least bright): Sports, Movie, Game, Internet, and Text. The last mode is DCR or Dynamic Contrast Ratio, which gives the e2051F its fairly impressive 20,000,000:1 contrast ratio.

Picture Quality

We noticed that in DCR mode it swung the brightness around a bit too widely and conspicuously, which was kind of annoying. Our DisplayMate tests seemed to show that everything was fine in terms of color, but there was a noticeable yellow cast on the picture, even when the color temperature was set to standard. There is an option to enhance the color saturation called Dynamic Color Boost (DCB), which we found to be rather overdone as it also over-sharpened the picture. We suggest to just leave it off.

Final Thoughts

Personally, I really like AOC’s design approach, that is, keep bulk down, and let the user focus on what is on the display. They certainly nailed it with the e2051F. Power users might have to look elsewhere however, since it doesn’t have any extra features, full HD resolution or a flexible support stand. However, it does its job as a monitor quite well and in stylish, space and energy-saving manner to boot, getting out of the way and letting you focus on what is most important.