Just recieved my Acer AL1916W and wanted to give you some brief opinions over it.
Going from a 17inch CRT to this, you really notice the wide aspect ratio, unpacking and plugging in was a doddle and slotting the screen into the base was just a case of clipping it in, even has a sticker on the screen telling you to adjust windows to 1440 x 900. My graphics card a overlclocked 6600gt 81.98 drivers didnt show the native resolution before hand but when switching on the pc it became available i still had to adjust the resolution instead of windows doing it for me .
Very bright screen, great looks and light weight- The space and and yes the dust hidden by my old screen (
) Downloaded some native resolution wallpaper and looks super. Pixel buddy shows no dead pixels.
Gaming, Halflife 2 and Call of Duty 2 look amazing along with the new tomb raider , the responce time really help no visible ghosting. Most of my games support the native 1440x900 resolution and after some config file hacks got call of duty in widescreen native res. Refresh rates available are 59 and 60 htz ( is there a difference ) mines on 60. going from a 85 htz crt to this i cannot notice and diffference in the refresh ( lcds dont refresh do they )
So obvisously there are games that dont support 1440x900 like need for speed MW ( i know theres a hack but cant get it to work) and the Free benchmarking tools like 3dmark what the monitor does pretty much fills up the screen with the picture. best to describe as i thought it would be is watching 4:3 content on a 16:9 telly set to fill the screen, its watchable and definitly usable but nothing still beats native res.
I have been trying to adjust the contrast and brightness and the default settings are too bright , ive got mine on around the 34-45 mark and seems to help, on a pure black screen , use pixel buddy very little noticable backlight bleed, but less apparent once i had adjusted the contrast and brightness.
As im using the nvidia forceware drivers and upped the colours slightly as i thought the screen looked slight better but left other settings the same. What settings at people running at.
Viewing angle is pretty good , but screen is is a corner an viewed straight on but viewing from the side is still good for a TFT but you start to get the hazing ( but this is still in acceptable)
Watching DVDs does seem to be overall good, but cant help to notice small imperfections and a very slight washed out look on some , tried some of the HD content trailers around and they seem very good ( depends on your CPU mines a 3700+SD)
if i force myself to be critical only thing that i could say is the DVD side of things could be little sharper( maybe the lack of DVI - No height adjustment just a tilt function which seems tight and dont want to force ( so got my screen sitting on two dvd cases side by side with the base in the middle. Running at the native res for games does increase the hit on the GPU and CPU , was slighty noticable playing GTA san andreas , but my san diego 3700( over clocked and 6600gt coped well so bear that in mind when purchasing.
Overall for the price and the fact theres no dead pixels on my unit( touch wood ) and little backlight bleed i would wholeheartly recommend the monitor if your looking for a above average LCD pc monitor. Im at work and my 17ich CRT doesnt feel the same.
Thanks to the folks in the forum at this thread to swaying me , money well spent.
