Product Reviews

Acer is edging into home cinema territory with the release of its AL2671W LCD TV, complete with built-in speakers. This is an attractive piece of kit for a living room, where you may want the look of a stylish flat TV but don't want the expense and bother of setting up a full home cinema surround system.

There are plenty of inputs on the set, including D-sub, DVI-D and a pair of SCART sockets, one of which also supports component inputs through a supplied lead. Acer assures us that the DVI socket is fully HDCP compliant (see the 'How it works' box below) and, combined with a resolution of 1,280x768, it is ready for high-definition

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content. Most recent graphics chipsets support widescreen resolutions, for a sharp native resolution desktop on this screen. The Acer is ideal for pairing with a Media Center PC.

The TV image quality may not be quite up to the quality of Philips or Pioneer, with their advanced image-processing technologies, but at this price it's great. It passed our greyscale and colour tests without problems. We played a few scenes from recent DVD releases and were happy as there was no discernable blurring on fast action sequences. Viewing angles are fantastic; we couldn't see any loss of quality from any angle.

Sound quality is surprisingly good from the pseudo-surround speakers, which have a decent range and deal well with bass. They won't stand up against a dedicated surround system, but they keep things neat, so your living room won't be taken over by speaker boxes and wires.

The AL2671W isn't huge, but the screen size will suffice for movie watching in most living rooms. It's a cheap way of getting a large, stylish flat-screen TV and has the resolution and quality to double as a fine PC display. Home cinema nuts should look elsewhere for absolute quality, but otherwise this screen is a great bargain.