Acer P205H LCD Monitor

Widescreen monitors are the norm these days, after being touted as the new ‘in’ thing a couple of years back. We have reviewed Viewsonic and BenQ monitors in the past and now it’s time to bring in some more brands; so why not the popular Acer. Today we have a 20-inch LCD monitor by them called the Acer P205H.

Design

Simple to look at first glance, this gleaner has a glossy black bezel for the front, with a regular matte black plastic back panel. The cursive ‘Acer’ logo is stuck on center of the bottom panel, with the model name on top right. On further scrutiny, one can see the sexy-looking aesthetic condiment on the far right hand side of the bottom panel, which is actually a power button gone glam. It is a flush mounted transparent plastic button, with some very cool looking techie contours embedded in the button itself. It lights up with a blue Led backlight when ‘on’, making it look really nice. The stand is a perfect circle, with a knit-like texture on its surface, again just for design rather than function.

This stand fixes on to the frame quite easily - it’s a clip on one - and quite sturdy at that. We have vertical movement of the screen, able to go about 25 degrees, but no sideways swiveling. The build quality though is great, and it sits sturdy on the desk, no jerkiness at the joint is observed when one moves the stand around. As for buttons, this model has them underneath the bottom panel, rather than the side. They are black and flush with the surface, with tiny white dots on the upper side to mark position, like frets on a fingerboard.

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Features
This is a true 16:9 format, 20-inch screen. We actually wanted the larger one to review, but no worries, this one will suffice for testing. The resolution is 1600x900@60Hz, while the panel is a TN panel. Contrast ratio is 20,000:1(dynamic), while brightness is 300 cd/m2. This model supports DVI-D input (with HDCP) and a VGA input, but no HDMI. There are no speakers, webcams or other shenanigans, we don’t miss them either. The response time is 5 ms.

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Performance
The night starts off with a DVI connection, and the accessing of the menu of the LCD. It pops up right near the buttons, thus fiddling around or calibrating is easy. There are presets for Text, Movie, Standard etc., with a special ‘e’ icon (as in eColor by Acer) for special color settings. It’s still best to get hands on with the controls, though the dynamic contrast setting is not bad at all. In manual tweaking, we could calibrate a low enough black bar, but not too deep. I’m afraid blacks are weak here. Another issue was that the screen is of the gloss, reflective kind. This is slightly hampering for innate prima donnas or screen gazing EMO kinds.

The brightness was sufficient, thus we did get quite a vibrant image. On our 256 grayscale pattern, high whites came out well discerned, even on very high contrast levels. Thus the good part here is that there is neutrality and no clipping in the high parts of dynamic range. Simply speaking, whites stay white even on high contrasts.

Overall vibrancy is there in the image; this is due to slight saturation in the color, and more warm hues rather than neutral. The reds and yellows in skin tone were definitely enhanced, though it looks nice. The colors are about 10 % oversaturated in warm colors. Movies look pretty good - we saw Independence Day and 300 Blu-ray, then played good old Crysis on the Acer. Motion is again a super part, we really got very little blur and edge artifacts like jaggies, even though the 1080p stuff is getting scaled down. Fonts come across very nicely, on a good contrast setting (like 89), using a word processor is a simple and enjoyable charm.

Conclusion
A reasonably priced monitor this is, at Rs. 7,500. It’s not full HD but 20 inches is not so small a size for viewing movies and enjoying a nice game. The blacks are weak, and screen is glossy, but besides that the brightness, colors and motion are very nice. It’s recommended as a choice for anyone who is not yet ready to take the full HD plunge, but wants a decent screen.