BIOS: Technology Means Business

Acer's AL1721 is a relatively low-cost 17in. TFT LCD monitor with a conventional 4:3 aspect ratio. Encased in a rounded beige bezel, the screen is targeted at business users and comes with dual video inputs, a native screen resolution of 1280x1024 pixels, a contrast ratio of 450:1 and brightness of 260cd/m². It's relatively speedy with a response time of 16ms too, so may also appeal to those who play video games and watch DVD-Movies on their PC. Unfortunately it's let down by poor performance, such as disappointing greyscale, white balance and focus levels. As a result, it's not suited to those who work with graphics for a living. There are also more attractive screens available that are capable of running faster, brighter and at higher resolutions.

Pros: Integrated speakers; dual video inputs; good response time
Cons: Poor focus and misconvergence; over saturated colours

Acer's 17in. AL1721 (338x270mm viewable area) is far from stylish, but its rounded beige looks may suit business environments. Its base is further testament to this, allowing you to raise, tilt and swivel the screen effortlessly with one hand. However, if you lower the screen too much, it'll lock into position and you'll have a fight on your hands to raise it again.

The 377x154x391mm (5.0kg) TFT LCD monitor caters for both analogue and digital inputs (both types of cables supplied) and offers a native screen resolution of 1280x1024 pixels (0.264mm pixel pitch). Its contrast ratio of 450:1 and brightness of 260cd/m² are both average, but its relatively speedy response time of 16ms should appeal to those who play video games and watch DVD-Movies on their PC. Viewing angles of 140-degrees for both horizontal and vertical axis are also impressive and should favour those intending to use the screen in a working environment, as will the integrated 1-Watt speakers.

The monitor has a dark panel with highlighted buttons, and there's five control buttons used for navigating the on-screen display positioned under the lower edge of the bezel. While this is a neat design touch, the fact that you can't actually see the buttons means you have to run your finger along the bezel in order to find the correct control. The stereo speakers are tucked neatly out of the way on the underside of the bezel, too.

The screen offered good brightness levels and allowed us to set it up so that large areas of black looked relatively solid and not washed out, unlike most laptop screens. Intensity levels of the AL1721 were poor however, with mid-range greys appearing more blue than grey. The screen displayed distinct grey levels towards its near peak white levels, but failed to handle top dark greyscale levels near black.

In testing, the top area of the screen suffered from reduced brightness, so whites appeared more grey than they did towards the bottom of the screen. Contrast levels were also irregular, with fine lines appearing blurry at the top two corners of the screen. The screen's focus and clock controls allowed us to fine tune the display, but the repercussion of sorting out the focus at the top of the screen resulted in the bottom area of the screen becoming blurry.

Pixel tracking and timing locks were even across the whole screen, which means that the AL1721 can accurately map image pixels using an analogue signal input. We did have to adjust the screen's clock settings slightly though, in order to reduce digital noise (beat patterns that modulate the intensity or colour of uniformity). We also noticed that the screen was ineffective at handling black and coloured text on white, grey and dark grey backgrounds. What this means is that the sharpness, contrast and visibility varies significantly with foreground and colour background intensities. In real-world terms, this means that black characters to not consistently appear to have a sharp edge or appear uniformly black when written on white, grey and black backgrounds.

Those working with graphics will not like the way the AL1721 over saturates colours. Whites appear bright and blacks are relatively deep, but primary colours can look a little too much and suffer with lack of focus. Unfortunately, there's no ability to alter the screen's colour temperature, but you do have the option to alter red, green and blue levels, which helped to reduce the intensity of the colours.

The AL1721 also had misconvergence, which is similar to an out-of-focus image, except that you can see thin coloured fringes around the edges of image detail. For instance, in our test samples, thin white lies appeared to have jaggy lines around the bold white lines. It's virtually impossible to have perfect colour registration everywhere on the screen, but the AL1721 did suffer quite significantly towards the corners of its screen. Colour registration, or convergence, was also quite bad on the peripherary of the screen.

On a more positive note, the AL1721's screen geometry, framing and aspect ratio were much more impressive. Using our test images, the AL1721 effectively displayed outer frames that fitted the whole screen, with little evidence of geometric distortion, such as pincushion, keystone, tilt or rotation. This is also a good thing because the AL1721 only offers controls to alter horizontal and vertical size/positions, which is very restrictive for high-end users working with intensive graphics applications.

Links:
Acer AL1721 Web site

About our tests:
To test imaging devices BIOS uses DisplayMate Technologies' DisplayMate, a software utility for adjusting, setting up, calibrating, tuning, testing, evaluating and improving image and picture quality on displays. It's designed to help us achieve the highest possible image and picture quality on any type of computer monitor, projector, TV or HDTV, with support for analogue and digital CRT, LCD, DLP, LCoS and plasma technologies. BIOS uses the software to check every aspect of a display's performance, including sharpness and contrast, colour and greyscale accuracy, as well as screen geometry.