Hello all, first time poster, long time reader here.
I just bought an Acer AL1916W monitor and though some of you may be interested in some user feedback. Especially since there was not much available a few days ago when I looked around the web.
First some background. I've been contemplating buying a dell 2405fpw for a while now but the budget was a bit tight so I sought other possible avenues. This new screen from Acer fit the gap perfectly with an unbelievably low price (you can get it for 339$ cdn), and attractive resolution (1440x900). This lower resolution (compared with 20" 1650x1080 or 1900x1200 with the 24") is also much easier on the graphic card which buys me some more time before I need to upgrade my GeForce 6600GT. So I went to a local store and purchased one on the spot.
First of all the monitor itself looks good (I got the black version). The bezel is small and looks like something from samsung. The controls at the bottom of the monitor are stylish with a nice green / amber fading power led. On the negative side there's no height adjustment with only a limited vertical tilt movement allowed by the stand.
On the connectivity side the monitor only supports DSub analog vga input, and it only has one. This is acceptable for a monitor of this price but I would've loved a more dell-like approach with tons of inputs. Also in my opinion if they need to put only one connector then it should be a DVI not a VGA, analog needs to disappear from PC IO imo.
OSD controls are limited, too limited I'd say. There are controls for brightness and contrast (thanks to the analog input), color temp, H-V positioning (why do they still support that?). Missing are further controls to force 4:3 and also a zoom mode like found on most dell monitors. In other word there's no easy way to tell this monitor to display 4:3 with black bars on each side.
Now the interesting stuff. Display quality is.. ok. I tried to figure out what type of panel this monitor uses and I would have to guess a TN-film but I'm not 100% sure. If someone can tell for sure just post a reply. Reason why I'm guessing a TN panel is that the viewing angles are pretty bad. As soon as I move my head to the side, even by a few degrees, colors start to wash out (whites become yellows..). This is a non-issue for me since it sits in front of me, but this type of panel would definitely not work in a larger monitor imo. I'm sure they'll still make them though so we'll judge for sure when we see one.
The display is spec'd at 8ms and it shows. Dragging windows in windows explorer, or scrolling black text on a white background gives no visible ghosting. In games however there's a slight but noticeable ghosting effect, at least if you look for it or if you're a hardcore gamer who's used to CRTs (like me
). In battlefield 2 for instance if you fly around in a chopper or jet you're most likely to notice it. The games also tend to show a lot more tearing than with CRTs, this could be related to the low 60hz refresh rate. Locking the display on the vsync gets rid of these annoying artefacts. The biggest problem this monitor has however imo is the backlight that shows through even on black backgrounds. This results in black screens being more greyish than black. To get the black back you need to lower the brightness to like 15%, but then you can lose other fine in-game details. I started playing FEAR using my CRT monitor the day the game came out, and now switching to the LCD is very painful, the game is so dark it makes the monitor look very bad at first. With some adjustments done to the colors and brightness its better but still far from perfect. Try to look at one in person to see if it bothers you too much before you buy it, else you may be surprised (like me..). Still after a few days of using it I'd say it's game-worthy, if you don't mind limited ghosting and washed out blacks. The rest of the colors are well rendered and under the warm color temp setting they look very good.
As a conclusion I think it's a good value and I recommend this monitor if you can live with the tradeoffs. If you can't wait to get a widescreen monitor but can't spend the extra $$ for pricier monitors, get this one it'll serve you well. When larger panel prices drop again sell it and get a 24"
A big plus is that it's easy on the graphic card with the lower resolution (1440x900) so you don't have to upgrade your older / cheaper GPU for a 7800GTX in order to get widescreen support.
Note: I tested the monitor's gaming performance using battlefield 2. I just want to say that bf2 does NOT support 16:10 properly and everything's just stretched to fit the LCD native res (map is oval not round). Let's hope ea gives us a solution to this problem asap!
---
Chris aka BlueFish
Login
Register
Search
