Acer B223wBymdr review

Fully adjustable stands are scarce among budget TFTs, but Acer manages to cram one in despite its £173 price. It lifts through 11cm and pivots to portrait mode for greater flexibility, and with a side bezel just 15mm thin you could feasibly line up two and tile your desktop.

Throw in a pair of USB ports for easy connection of peripherals, a set of basic 1W speakers and a headphone socket, and you have a monitor that certainly seems big on features. But some of that good work is undone by the omission of anything more up-to-date than a D-SUB input on the back; it isn't a deal-breaker, but it puts it alone at the foot of the pile as the only analogue monitor here.

Upon connection it auto-adjusted its geometry without a hitch, but the colours needed tweaking. Thankfully, the control buttons on the front are clearly labelled, so we had no trouble making some adjustments and raising the brightness and contrast to ease the gloomy out-of-the-box tone.

From there the Acer did pretty well in our technical tests, with only its fairly muted white and black test screens ripe for criticism - this isn't a monitor to blow your mind with its contrast, despite the quoted 10,000:1 dynamic ratio. But gradients were smooth, the backlight was even, and colour tone was accurate.

Whether these few weaknesses, along with a lack of sharpness in video, put you off the Acer will depend on how important that stand is to you. But we just can't find enough positives to justify spending £173 on an analogue TFT when £50 less will get you a monitor as superior as the BenQ.

Author: David Bayon