Acer P244w

Posted 08/25/2008 at 12:00pm | by David Murphy

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Acer’s native-1080p display wins points for hitting the widescreen 16:9 formfactor, but the P244w treats its colors with the same unpleasantness it treats its grayscales. The monitor’s color saturation suffers from a reduced range on both the top and bottom ends of the spectrum: Colors lose their vibrancy as they get darker and become washed out as they get lighter.

The P244w offers acceptable detail in its grayscales in our synthetic tests but still displays less detail in an image than other monitors we’ve tested in our real-world routines. And we didn’t enjoy how dark scenes in our real-world movie tests always looked tinted by a bit of unnatural brightness—we much prefer a richer, deeper black.

When the P244w is on, you’re treated to bleeding backlight on the screen’s top and bottom edges during darker scenes.

Start saving your phone books: You can’t adjust the height of this display. And we dislike how the display’s presets don’t appear to vary the image quality very much at all. The P244w’s list of connections—DVI, VGA, and HDMI—lacks the component option that higher-quality displays often come with. We’d prefer a monitor that has more: picture quality, connections, ergonomic options—anything.

Acer P244w

Ace of Spades

Native-1080p support; acceptable grayscale detail.

Ace of Base

No height adjustment, component inputs; too-bright blacks, reduced color saturation range.

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