AOC 27" QHD 144hz Gaming Monitor

I had a very good 1080p monitor that I needed to replace, and I wanted to try a curved monitor. So I bought this. I didn't like the pictures online because it looked too "chic", "soho", or modern with the snazzy stand. Fortunately, the stand is actually very nice and the color is more subdued so it doesn't look like something from the lobby of a swanky hotel. It fits in with my gamer style laptop and peripherals, without exaggerating that look either. In other words, the styling is nice. When I first used the monitor, I was pretty frustrated with the visuals. I realized that I am coming from a lower resolution, at 1080p, so it's almost like the eye is trained differently. At first with this monitor, I saw a sea of flickering colors, I couldn't see anything solid. It was fine for games, but text and solids were very difficult. I took a magnifying glass, and I saw exactly that - you can see in my picture. A white background is a grid of pixels with red and green. It's exactly what I was seeing too, impossible to ignore at first. I played relentlessly with the settings, and adjusted many ways to calibrate this. Nothing really worked. But after using it a couple days, I was able to train my eyes to ignore the artifacts that were so obvious at first. It's probably just due to coming from a very different monitor. The other problem I had was everything was too small. So I had to download a browser plugin to make the default text size larger. I did other tweaks like that too. I was very pleased with the functionality of the menus, in terms of navigating the controls on this machine. I bought it because it had the control device to make this easier. That part was fine. But I was frustrated by the menus because a lot of options are not available unless other things are selected. It's not really intuitive and some features are grayed out because of other settings, etc. Lot's of hassle dealing with all that, and none of the presets were any good, so I tweaked everything in a very custom way to make it work for me and that took a lot of time. I really like that this monitor has a USB port but the ports for everything are extremely inconvenient because they are on the bottom of the monitor and awkward to use, I have to get a flashlight to see them and crane my neck. Horrible way to try to connect a peripheral. There is another problem, I use a headset but sometimes I want to just hear the audio from the speakers. There is no way to toggle this, so I have to unplug the headset each time. Extremely inconvenient, again because the plugs are underneath on the back. Another really frustrating thing about this monitor is the ambient LED lighting. First off, I turned all that off but the power LED still emits a very powerful red glow that I cannot disable. So in summary, this is an incredibly frustrating monitor but at the same time it performs well once these obstacles are adjusted for and taken into account. My first instinct was to return it immediately but so far I am glad I stuck it out for a few days. The curved features and others are growing on me. And it does look great gaming.