Acer 26’’ for the price of 24, 27" Dell
We are in the middle of a price war. After Nec’s offensive last month, it’s Acer’s turn to attack the 24” market with the AL2616WD. At 800€, this 26” is cheaper than monitors that are 2” smaller and priced 950 € VAT included. The price of the biggest competitor for 24” monitors, the 2407WFP, oscillates between 805 € to 1150€ depending on promotions, which happen quite often.
The Dell 2707WFP is even more expensive at approximately 1500€.
Although superficially they don’t resemble each other, these two monitors have similarities:
- they are both
wide gamut and have extended color spaces
- their resolution is 1920 x 1200 pixels
- they have an HDCP digital interface (DVI not yet HDMI).
They also have major differences:
- the pitch of the Acer is 0,286 mm instead of 0.303 for the Dell
- the foot of the Acer is fixed while the Dell is vertically adjustable
- there are only IT interfaces for Acer whereas Dell also has a YUV input
- the 2707WFP has a memory card player and USB hub
- Dell’s bezel is metallic and the Acer is plastic.
The problem with bigger and bigger diagonals is that resolutions are constantly changing and the size of the pitch has strongly increased. This means that with the native resolution, the display shows very big letters.
To give you a more concrete idea, here is text written in Arial size 18 with Photoshop and the size of the characters as it appears on another monitor without artificial enlargement:
The tests
We run tests for reaction time in games, delay of display, and video rendering (SD, HD 720p, HD 1080p). We also evaluate ergonomics, viewing angles, and the quality of upscaling.
For color fidelity we use the LaCie Blue Eye Pro colorimeter, based on the Gretag tool and coupled with the new LaCie software suite. More evolved than the previous version, this helps us to compare a monitor’s display quality (color spectrum and DeltaE) in standard settings and after calibration. Results are sometimes surprising as it’s often best to take the time to manually adjust colors (or at least contrast, brightness and color temperature).
The results of the study of 18 patches makes it possible to draw patterns visually resituating the variation of colors compared to an ideal gray scale.
For game tests, after developing a response time measuring procedure last year with a probe and an oscilloscope, we eventually came to the conclusion that the measurements weren’t representative of what we actually saw on the screen. We then developed a new test procedure in the summer of 2005, based on pictures of images on the monitor. In this way we can capture afterglow in two environments. The first is between bright colors, and the second is for black and white (like in wire frame mode). The software used is
Pixel Persistence Analyzer (or PixPerAn for regular users). Pictures showing these ghosting effects are captured with a Canon 350D at a shutter speed of 1/1000 s. We take 50 pictures in burst mode for each test to precisely measure the progression of afterglow between images. This time results are consistent with what we see in games. Finally, practical tests are the same in games, HD and DVD video, web surf etc.
The test computer is self-assembled, has an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor and NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX card.
