The Acer AL2216WBD - You have to see it to believe it!

Like many people, I spend a lot of time every day looking at a computer monitor and frankly any item that is going to be involved in so much of my daily life needs to be of fairly high quality.

However, also like many people, I don't have unlimited money to spend on the things that I may want and so the cost of an item ends up being an equally important consideration to it's quality.

Finding myself in need of a new screen, I started shopping around and found this monitor. At $189 (after rebate), the Acer AL2216WBD definitely managed to meet the cost criteria. The question was.. Would it be able to stand up to my quality concerns as well?

The only way to know for certain was to bring it home.

Out of the Box..

The Acer AL2216WBD is a 22" diagonal, widescreen, LCD monitor. It comes out of the box in two pieces, the screen and the base being separate and you are required to "snap" the monitor onto the stand to full assemble the display.

You also receive:

- 1 DVI video cable
- 1 VGA video cable
- 1 standard power cord
- 1 users manual

To snap the two pieces of the monitor together requires a fairly considerable amount of force and for a moment I was concerned that I might break the connections in the base before it would fit together properly however, the two pieces ultimately came together as intended.

While the Acer AL2216WBD stand allows you to tilt the screen about 25 degrees, it has no options for vertical height adjustment or for rotating the screen. If you need the bottom of the monitor to be more than 4" above your desk you will need to place something under the monitor stand in order to raise the height of the display.

How does it perform?

In my opinion, exceedingly well.

The Acer AL2216WBD displays a clean, bright image which is easy to read and to look at.

I ran several test patterns on the Acer AL2216WBD to determine both the color accuracy and screen quality and found that the AL2216WBD managed to beat nearly all of my expectations by coming very close to a perfect match for the palette displayed by Adobe Photoshop and with zero dead pixels (at least on the unit I purchased).

The built in menu has five separate settings for color and image quality (User, text, standard, graphics and movie).

"Custom" is the setting which stores the adjustments made by the user for color, brightness and contrast, the other four are factory settings for various things you may need the monitor for, with "standard" being the basic default the monitor starts with before any user adjustments are made.

"Text" lowers the overall contrast to make looking at dark text on a white background easier on the eyes. "Graphics" punches both the brightness and contrast up considerably while "movie" lowers both contrast and brightness although not to the same degree that the "text" setting does.

The Acer AL2216WBD specs are:

Resolution: 1680 x 1050 (16:10 widescreen display)
Response time: 5ms (average)
Contrast: 700:1
Brightness: 300 nit
Dot Pitch: 0.282
Colors: 16.7 million

For working on Documents, I found that the Acer AL2216WBD provided a bright, clear display with fonts being legible sized down to roughly 6.5, however anything smaller than that became too compressed to read.

For gaming, the Acer AL2216WBD provided a large, crisp viewing area with no noticeable motion blur due to the 5ms response time.

When watching movies on the Acer AL2216WBD, the image was detailed and well rendered, however as the 1680 x1050 display is set to a ratio of 16:10 as opposed to 16:9, some movies labeled as being optimized for "widescreen" displays will have black bars along the top and bottom of the screen. This is a non-issue for me but since some people are bothered by this sort of thing I felt that it should be mentioned here.

The Acer AL2216WBD has connections for both analog VGA and Digital DVI. It does not offer any connection options for HDMI so if you wish to connect it to a newer HDTV receiver or Blu Ray player you will need to purchase a DVI-HDMI adaptor.

The Acer AL2216WBD does not have any sort of USB hub or speakers built into it as many other monitors do. Since the speakers typically found in most monitors are small and tend to produce poor quality audio, I don't mind the lack of speakers at all.

While I would have preferred that the Acer AL2216WBD had provided USB connections for convenience, the lack of a hub is not a terrible hardship either.

My Final Thoughts

Ultimately, I was looking for a quality display at an affordable price. The Acer AL2216WBD manages to satisfy both of those criteria easily.

Gaming, web surfing, photo editing and writing documents (such as this review) are a joy with this display and if it is missing a few minor options, for the price I am more than willing to overlook their omission.

If you are looking for a new 22" monitor, put the Acer AL2216WBD on your list for consideration.

I think you'll be glad that you did.