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(More customer reviews)I purchased this monitor based on nagappa's excellent review (Thanks again nagappa!). In short, that review was accurate and I vouch for everything Nagappa said. I would like to add a few things about this particular Acer monitor that make it perhaps the best computer monitor I have yet seen, better than the Apple Cinema Display IMHO. This is the 3rd display that I've purchased in the last month. I'm going to explain why this monitor is the best, by describing the flaws in the other 2 displays that the Acer overcomes.
The first was a Samsung from Costco model P2450, I got it on the cheap + rebate! But I got the shaft with Samsung. The monitor BUZZED when the brightness was below 99%. The buzzing was not loud, but still audible in a quiet room and incredibly distracting. It's an electrical buzzing noise that occurs from cheap power sources. There is a lot of talk on the internet about cheap power sources in otherwise beautiful displays. The Samsung display was beautiful (80,000:1 contrast!), but the buzzing. C'mon. Keeping brightness at a nonbuzzing 100%, I installed a free app for my mac called "ScreenShade" that allowed me to control the brightness using the keyboard, but it washes out the colors tremendously when you lower brightness. And in my line of work (web programming), I often had to use the color-picker to pick a pixel, and screenShade would interfere, meaning I would have to disable screenshade each time and blind myself at 100% Samsung brightness about every 15 minutes. I got tired of that real fast and have been tolerating it the last couple weeks while my Acer was being shipped. Also, the frame around the display was glossy-black, which you wouldn't think is a bad thing at first, until you realize that not only does it reflect glare as in my case from a window in the room, but the inner bevel of the frame reflects the screen. It's annoying, because it creates a mirrored effect of the display that distorts the edges of the screen. Really, c'mon. Form over function's taken way too far here. I will also mention that this display did not swivel at all, non-height-adjustable, no usb ports in the the back, and no speakers. Not that I was really looking for these extras. FYI, $246 total charge at Costco.
Second display was the Apple Cinema Display 24". Beautiful. Solid. As perfect a picture you could ask. Plus it had USB ports, camera and mic for iChat, and pretty darn good speakers. And most important, sports 1920 x 1200 resolution! (That's about an extra two inches of vertical screen real estate!, excelled for programmers such as myself). Problem? I set it all up, and in about 20 minutes I notice this "snap-crackle-pop" sound coming from the upper-back part of the display. I ask myself, is it just me or is this the first time I have ever heard this sound from any electronic device that was not about to catch fire. I took it right back to the Apple Store for immediate refund. I turned down their offer to replace the monitor on-spot for 3 reasons: 1) I read up on the internet after discovering the sound, and found that many people had reported the same, and in fact, have been reporting this issue since early 2009! Apple hasn't addressed it since?? I didn't want a replacement that would show this or any other defect outside of my return period. I would also like to add that when I went in to replace it, Apple employees thought I was on AppleCare and had owned the display for a while, and they were *very* inattentive telling me they were too busy to schedule me at the genius bar for assistance. When I mentioned that I had just bought the monitor and was well within the return-period, they jumped and got me right in. This spooked me a bit, knowing I would not be apple-cared for very well if a future issue sprung up. 2) The display is glossy. I know that you can close yourself off in a windowless room and the display be alright, but windowless rooms stifle my creativity. hah. And yes, the cinema display is WAAAAAY too glossy if you have a window behind you. It's unusable. I have a normal iMac (with glossy display) faced 90 degrees from the window, and it is tolerable. But maybe if it weren't for...3) The Apple Display is $1000! That's 4x as much as the Acer & Samsungs. For that money, I expected the best. But considering the Acer not necessarily being 'made for macs', it sure does offer the perfect display in what I was looking for. I should also add in retrospect that the Cinema Display only swivels up and down, not left-or-right, and is not height-adjustable. It also weighs a ton compared to Acer and Samsung. Also, it BUZZES when you turn the brightness above 20! Actually, it's more of a hum compared to a Buzz, but still. Apple, hire a six-sigma team to help you out with Cinema Display Manufacturing. This is not $1000 quality.
So I ended with this Acer Display B243HL, and I LOVE it. Make sure that model number is exactly the same, as there is a similar Acer model that is actually an older display, which has weaker speakers and is not LED backlit. This baby, the B243HL, IS LED backlit, and sports something like 8,000,000:1 contrast. Essentially meaning that blacks are very black, and not that shiny-grey-black you see on poor contrast monitors. The monitor stand swivels left-right 35 degrees each way, upward by 15 degrees-downward by 5 degrees. Height goes up and down about by about the length of your hand (my hand is about as long as an iPhone). I initially wasn't really looking for adjustability in height/swivel, but it makes a BIG difference having the monitor positioned just right. It has USB ports in the back which I connect my iPhone and Apple wired+numeric keyboard into. NOTE - the Acer's USB ports are actually powered by the laptop connected to it via a special USB cord connecting the two; so unplug the laptop, and the iPhone plugged into the display stops charging. This display is about an inch wider than the Samsung, yet sports the same 1920 x 1080 resolution. So I dunno. It definitely "seems" wider though the onscreen images don't appear stretched in any way. I would like to note that I followed nagappa's color calibration settings, and they didn't work for me. Probably because I am using a Macbook Pro with Anti-glare screen, believe it or not, the Acer's Plug-n-play color setting is actually incredibly close to the Macbook Pro's. So for me, it worked right out of the box. I have also adjusted brightness of the monitor down to 15%, AND am still using that ScreenShade app just to be able to control the brightness further from the keyboard. Guess what...NO BUZZING! I turned brightness all the way up, all the way down, it is quiet. NO BUZZING period. What a relief. It does make a very slight hum, I think it's coming from a fan perhaps? Could just be current, but I can't hear it in my quiet room unless I stick my head to the back of the monitor. It is maybe 5 times less loud than the buzzing of the other monitors. The blue led 'power-is-on' indicator on the front-frame of the display is pretty bright. I might cover it with some paper. Next, the display buttons are all square, and you can't really read which button does what as the 'text' over the buttons is black-on-black. Couple this with a menu system that was designed by VERY left-brained engineers. The menu-system for this monitor is atrocious, if you just want to adjust brightness up or down, you have to navigate through 4 menu levels, and 'click' through 7 TIMES just to enable to brightness controls, and all done using one of 6 non-distinguishable black buttons. It's laughably bad. Acer -- just copy someone else's menu and make this monitor 'usable'. My Gateway FlatPanel from 2001 has a better menu system than this 2009 monitor. Learn from others. IT's sad, because this otherwise superior monitor that could dominate the market is extremely user-unfriendly with those menu controls. Anyways, I suggest that ScreenShade app. Next, the black frame around the monitor is a matte texture, meaning it does not reflect either from the screen or the background. It's perfect. The speakers are 2.0 Watt, really not great at all. I am not picky when it comes to audio, but I will say that my Macbook Pro with Lid Closed produces more "pleasant" sound than this monitor does. I may still use the monitor speakers, just know that the quality just isn't there. A few more notes: The manual that comes with the display is atrocious. There is a PDF manual on the CD with a bit more info. In case anyone owning this monitor would like to know, there is a small latch with grooves on the back of the support-stand that appears to only be good for locking/unlocking the height-adjuster in it's lowest position only. I'm not entirely sure why you would want to lock the height only in the low position, but you will need to hold this latch 'open' in order to raise the display. Which leads me to the lastly big surprise....THIS MONITOR ROTATES 90 DEGREES CLOCKWISE!!!! As a programmer, I FULLY appreciate vertical screen real estate. 1200 vertical resolution for Cinema Display? Try 1920 vertical with this Acer!! Had I known beforehand about the screen rotation I would have purchased this monitor above the Apple and Samsung.I once had a ~23" rotating HP display at work, it was a beauty to program in Vertical mode. I'm excited and truly looking forward to using that rotation mode. How did I find out about the rotation? In the display preferences, there is a rotation setting that got me wondering. Of course, to rotate the display you first must raise it to full-height, and be careful when you slide the monitor up, I cut my knuckle on some very sharp plastic on the stand as I was sliding the monitor up. So be careful. Also, while I'm not terribly concerned about the build quality of the monitor (I haven't found any dead/locked pixels), I did...Read more›
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