X-bit labs

Closer Look at the 19" Monitor Features. Part III (page 2)

Category: Other

by Oleg Artamonov

[ 03/30/2005 | 01:45 PM ]

Acer AL1912

This is an inexpensive model for office use; the white plain-looking case has only one embellishment – I mean its round silvery control buttons.

The monitor’s base allows regulating the tilt of the screen. Like the entire case, the base is all made of plastic, and the device shakes a little even at a slight push (in the majority of monitors, there is a steel plate in the foundation of the base to make it more rigid and stable). You may want to consider this fact if you’ve got little children or home pets and need a monitor which doesn’t readily topple over.

The Acer AL1912 is equipped with an analog input only; the power adapter is built into the case.

The monitor’s menu is designed without any extravaganza, but is easy to use. You can quickly access (with a single press of a button) the auto-adjustment feature only.

By default, the brightness setting is set to 100% in the menu, and the contrast to 80%. For the screen to have a luminance of 100nit (1 nit = 1 candela per 1 square mater) I set the contrast to 63% and the brightness to 60%. The monitor controls its brightness by modulating the power of the backlight lamps at 180Hz frequency.

It seems like there’s nothing very remarkable about the Acer AL1912: an ordinary office monitor with a minimum of functionality and at a small price. Yet it so happened that the AL1912 became the first 19” monitor on a TN+Film matrix we tested in our labs. As you know, TN+Film technology has almost entirely driven all the competing technologies (S-IPS, MVA and PVA) out of the 17” LCD monitor market, but TN+Film monitors with a diagonal of 19 inches were simply nonexistent until recently.

You can refer to my article entitled X-bit’s Guide: Contemporary LCD Monitor Parameters and Characteristics for a detailed description of the characteristics of each type of the LCD matrix. Here’s a short version, for TN+Film technology.

TN+Film matrices have in fact only one serious advantage over matrices of other types. I mean their low manufacturing cost because no other competing technology can compare to TN+Film in this aspect. Then, TN matrices can easily have a low response time in their specifications. Right now it may be as low as 8 milliseconds, but the manufacturer declares a modest speed of 16 milliseconds for the AL1912. Unfortunately, as you saw a number of times in my tests, and as I argued in the above-mentioned article, the specified response time does not always reflect the real speed of the matrix well. If you delve somewhat deeper into the matter, you’ll see that although TN+Film matrices do have a very good responsiveness, they are not unchallenged because S-IPS matrices generally have similar performance.