Some people have asked about this monitor in the forums, but there's no user review yet. So, here's mine.
I got this monitor from
NCIX in Canada. I would recommend this retailer, purchasing from them was painless as always. The main bonus is that, for $19.66 CDN, you can get 1 Year Express Coverage. This offers 1 year RMA to NCIX, rather than to Acer directly, but the best thing is that they offer a 30-day 0-dead-pixel guarantee. Acer will only RMA for 5 or more dead pixels, so I felt this was well worth the additional cost. Fortunately, I didn't need it, testing revealed no dead or stuck pixels. Acer offers a 3-year warranty on the unit.
The monitor was well packaged in expanded polystyrene. The unit itself was in a polythene bag and the screen had a plastic shield with important first-use instructions. Also included were a manual, a power cable, a DVI-D cable and a 15-pin VGA cable.
The VGA cable is not of terribly good quality and you may notice some blurriness at high resolutions. Just use the DVI cable. New graphics cards are all coming with DVI as standard anyway and you can pick up a DVI card for very little lately.
The screen advertises a 5ms refresh time. This is very good, and borne out in subjective testing, I did not notice any ghosting or blurring in games or movies. I played a lot of first-person shooters (FEAR, Doom 3, Quake 4, Painkiller, Half-Life 2) and noticed nothing.
The image is very sharp using DVI. So sharp, in fact, that coming off a CRT I noticed that it actually made bad source material look worse, for instance, compressed video. The relative blurriness of the CRT functioned as a sort of crude anti-aliasing. Good-quality video, however, looks excellent, and with a resolution of 1680x1050 this would be a good screen for HD content. The resolution is perhaps "low" for a screen this size, but I find it makes a very comfortable Windows environment, text is easy to read, and the screen-door effect is only noticeable if you put your face right up to the monitor. At about 12 inches viewing distance it's completely imperceptible.
There is no input lag whatsoever. I ran a timer using the Acer and a CRT set to cloned display and after ten minutes there was not even a slight deviation.
Color rendition is good. I ran tests for color banding and noticed absolutely nothing, all gradients looked smooth. It's a 6-bit panel, but my opinion is that if you can't notice dithering when looking at color gradients, you certainly won't notice when gaming or watching movies. The colours are vibrant. It's not the most accurate and probably below the standards required for professional image editing or DTP and so on, but it's at least the equal of a 21" Sony CRT tube. I didn't notice any "twinkling" in movies or other TN-panel weaknesses, and this is coming from the aforementioned CRT.
Brightness is also good. I can produce a nice, bright image at a brightness setting of around 20. Strong ambient light doesn't present any real problem. There is a little backlight bleeding at top and bottom which becomes noticeable when the screen is dark, but overall not much to worry about. Blacks can look slightly washed-out when ambient light is low thanks to the 700:1 contrast ratio, but again, this isn't a major distraction and unless you're looking for it, you're unlikely to notice.
The stand is pretty cheap. If the desk is shaken the monitor will wobble back and forth, but not excessively. The stand only adjusts for tilt, not height or swivel. The default height it is set to is ergonomic for me, but for others with different workspace dimensions (or personal physical dimensions) might need to result to placing it on a telephone book or some other inelegant solution. It also offers absolutely no cable management.
The screen has a standard 3-pin power socket, and no external power brick, which is good for reducing cable clutter. The OSD is fairly standard, not offering huge functionality, and with the standard 4-button menu/exit/cycle-up/cycle-down navigational arrangement. With an LCD fed with a digital signal there's really not a lot to do with an OSD anyway, any adjustments you need can be made in software.
Viewing angle isn't as good as advertised. I would say there is probably a 90 degree zone in the horizontal and about 60 in the vertical before distortion gets too bad. The sweet spot for best color rendition and brightness is narrower though. You could have as many friends watching as would be appropriate for a screen this size, and nobody will have a genuinely bad picture.
Scaling to non-native resolutions is not too bad. The Acer does a much better job than my 15.4" notebook screen, which uses an LG panel. I'm fortunate enough to have an SLI GeForce 7800GTX 512 rig, which can run any current game at native resolution without breaking a sweat. Of course, running at native looks much sharper, so I do suggest that if you are going to be gaming, make sure your system can maintain a decent framerate at the native resolution.
Overall, this is an excellent screen for the price. This is pretty much the cheapest 22" widescreen LCD around, and it's a very nice product. I'm more than happy with it. For gaming and movies, it's great, thanks to fast response time and no input lag. For general use, it's just a nice screen.
Pros:
Low price
Fast response time
No input lag
Good color rendition and brightness for the price point
Cons:
Cheap stand
Low-quality VGA cable
No HDCP support
Slight backlight bleeding
Contrast not the best
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