Acer AL1917AS review

Acer's AL1971AS TFT monitor measures 19 inches from corner to corner, but it's not the prettiest display we've ever clapped eyes upon.

Its silver bezel and black base look neat enough, but the overall feel is on the plasticky side. The base in particular isn't very steady. Adjust the tilt of the monitor and you'll find it wobbles back and forth.

The Acer's specification isn't particularly striking either. It lacks a digital DVI connector, so you'll have to use the analogue VGA port. There's a 3.5mm jack input for connecting your sound card to the built-in speakers, but you'll only want to use them in an emergency as they sound drab and lightweight.

A quick response time of 8ms suggests that the Acer should effortlessly cope with fast moving games and DVDs. In our tests it certainly lived up to our expectations. High-speed movement was handled without any ghosting or jumpy erratic motion being obvious. Its image quality wasn't, however, as vibrant as that of our Best Buy monitor, the BenQ FP91G+, and lacked focus and contrast. This is due to the Acer's inferior analogue D-Sub connection.

The analogue-only connection counted against the Acer in our other image quality tests. Black text against a grey background lacked cleanly defined edges and our Windows desktop wasn't as crisply rendered as we would have liked. Fiddling with the 'Focus' setting in the on-screen menus helped a little, but didn't fix the problem. Colour reproduction in our test photos was generally good though.

The unremarkable image quality and lack of a DVI socket leave the Acer AL1917AS trailing the competition. If you want a 19in monitor, you probably want it for either gaming, watching movies. For these kind of applications you'll also want top-notch image quality. Our Best Buy TFT monitor may cost £30 more, but it's well worth it.