The Acer AL2216Wbd Wide screen LCD Monitor is a twenty-two inch widescreen monitor. I was looking at this beauty earlier this summer in the $500 plus range and now it can be found for slightly over $300. If you are into gaming then this monitor gives you a big area for all your gaming pleasures along with crystal-clear quality that is the best I have seen. Are you into quality digital photography? If so, this beauty brings out the photos, that shows you exactly how good or bad your digital photos really are. For general use, you will find the big twenty-two inch widescreen gives you more to view with brilliant colors and clarity.


The Screen!
The screen has a five-millisecond response time, with 300 nits of brightness and a 700:1 contrast ratio. This gives it great color and clarity with up to 1680 x 1050 in resolution.

I love how you can move from the sides left or right or up and down without seeing a change in the appearance of the monitor as soon as you move your head a little. The quality of this LCD monitor give you 160 degrees of movement left to right without much loss in the way the screen looks and 170 degrees in the up and down position. This is a big improvement over older monitors that changed as soon as you moved a few inches in any direction.

Dot pitch is 0.282 mm, which gives it the clarity, and has 24-bit (16.7 million) colors for the beautiful color it displays.


Other Features!
The monitor that I am using is in black, which makes it stand out with its beauty. The controls for the monitor are at the bottom center of the monitor, but I didn’t have to set any of them. Right out of the box, I plugged it into my computer with a DVI cable and it worked perfectly with Windows XP, no adjustments needed.

Connections to the computer can be made in analog or digital. There is a connection for the standard VGA - 15 pin and a connection for a DVI-D - 24-pin digital connection. I did some testing with both cables to see if there is any difference in quality and it proved to me that the DVI-D connection provide better clarity and color.

The monitor comes with a limited 3-year warranty and is Energy Star compliant.


My Thoughts!
I tried out the game “ArchLord” to see how the monitor looked with its graphics and performance. The graphics were great and the game played flawlessly without any slowdown in the action. The monitor was connected to my ATI RADEON X700 PRO video card and running with an AMD Athlon 64-bit 3800 processor; with the power of the processor and the video card, the monitor played the game flawlessly.

For testing a movie, I decided on “Lord of the Rings, the Return of the King.” The movie played like a dream, bright brilliant colors with clarity throughout the movie. Viewing movies on the Acer AL2216Wbd, is like having a mini Home Theater system through my computer.

Internet use comes alive with the twenty-two inch screen. Using Microsoft Office tools like “Word, Excel and PowerPoint” provides for a large area to see more from side to side with the widescreen, verses the normal screen. General use of the computer with this size of screen brings in excitement for me to use the computer more, when I get to work and have to use my small regular seventeen-inch screen, it makes me feel like I am lost with out the Acer LCD monitor.

I have always enjoyed photography and I love to take photos with my digital camera, so I was excited to try out some of the photos I have taken. For viewing and editing your digital photos, the Acer monitor is the perfect monitor. The photos come alive with the brilliant colors that the LCD monitor displays. If there is any noise in your digital photos, you will be able to see it a lot easier with this monitor. The clarity of a good digital photo is amazing on a big size monitor like this.




Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 329
Operating System: Windows and Macintosh