I bought this monitor for my wife since she was still on an old school 15″ monitor, but with its usability for gaming as well I figure I’d share my impressions on it here on the blog in case any of you are in the market for a new LCD monitor. I’m not going to go into the tech specs and refresh rate and all that – there’s dedicated forums with hardware geeks that will help you on it if you need that kind of info. I’ll just talk about it from a gamer’s perspective.
When I originally bought this monitor, I figured, an LCD monitor is an LCD monitor right? Is the brand really a big deal? Apparently it is. After this monitor, I’ve decided never to buy Acer again. Hit the jump to see why.
Our monitor setup and the first issue I had
Currently, I run a dual monitor setup on my PC with two Dell LCD’s: an 18″ Ultrasharp and a 17″ regular LCD. I have the Ultrasharp running with DVI to my PC and my other LCD is running VGA to the same PC, and I also have an Xbox 360 hooked up to my Ultrasharp through its VGA port. Both monitors are hooked up to a nVidia GeForce 9500 GT card.
My wife is connected with the Acer 21.6″ monitor through DVI to an ATI Radeon HD 3450 card (which only has an HDMI and DVI port).
Why bother sharing my own monitor setup if I’m talking about the Acer monitor? To highlight my first nigling with it. On my Ultrasharp, I have the PC and a 360 both hooked up to the monitor. There’s a convenient little button right at the front of the monitor that I can use to switch between my PC and 360 on the fly. When I’m not playing my 360, I have a two monitor PC setup but when I want to play it, I turn the 360 on, hit the switch button on the monitor and now I have my 360 displayed on my Ultrasharp while I still have my PC running on the other monitor. Unfortunately for the Acer x213W, no such button exists to switch between the two inputs. You have to manually go into the monitor’s menus and switch it there. For the amount of times I switch between my 360 and PC over the course of each evening, going into the menu every time would drive me nuts.
General Usability and the second issue I had
No general usability issues – the screen size is huge and looks great. But then again I don’t do any real photo editing or other hardcore applications to really notice individual pixels or the difference between VGA and DVI so take my general impressions on its looks with a grain of salt. Of course, maybe at this size of a screen, DVI will make a bigger difference.
The tilting of the monitor leaves something to be desired though. With my Dell monitors, the monitor is mounted to the base from the back middle area of the monitor, allowing you to easily tilt it up or down at pretty good angles with ease. The Acer monitor doesn’t have a back mount, but rather, it’s mounted sort of from the bottom. This limits the degree of tilting a great deal, and at first I thought I couldn’t even tilt it at all. Still, it’s adequate but not as nice as a monitor that is mounted from the back.
The “Acer LCD Defect”: the third issue I had
The above two issues were minor compared to this final one I encountered. My wife started complaining to me about how sometimes when she turns the monitor on, no signal comes from the PC. This happened when she would either bring the computer out of sleep mode the next morning, or after the PC is off and she turns it on, followed by the monitor. In both cases, the monitor wouldn’t pick up any sort of signal. I put my machine to sleep each night and in the morning I just hit a button and the computer and the monitors spring back to life. With her, the monitor just refused to turn on so her “workaround” to this problem was to manually turn off the PC and turn it back on with the monitor still on. For some reason if the monitor is on and the PC boots up for the first time, it gets the signal. But if the monitor is turned on after the PC has been started, nothing happens.
I tried downloading the newest drivers for the monitor onto her system, but the issue was still prevalent. At this point, her workaround is to turn the monitor on before booting up her machine, and never putting her computer on sleep. Even then, it seems more intuitive to turn on your PC first, since it takes longer to boot up so she sometimes forgets and now we have to manually reboot PC.
I decided to do some research on this and apparently it’s widespread on not just this Acer x213W LCD model, but other Acer LCDs as well. The issue appears to be specific to the DVI connection on the LCD monitor. From what I understand, if I use a VGA cable, there’s none of this “no signal” problem. Of course, with her not having a VGA port on her graphics card, this doesn’t quite work for us. But yeah all sorts of Acer LCD users are having this problem, and Acer doesn’t openly admit to the issue even though it is rampant.
After googling the issue and reading forums and threads, here are the possible workarounds I found:
1. Unplugging the power cord on the monitor and plugging it back in to “reset the monitor”
2. disable DDC/CI from the on-screen display controls
3. complain loud enough to Acer’s poor customer support, and they will potentially allow you to send your monitor in so Acer technicians can update the firmware.
4. use a VGA cable
I’ve had no luck with the first two proposed solutions, so I’m down to the last two. I heard that dealing with Acer customer support is not too great, and at the same time, we no longer have my wife’s old monitor to use if we were to send in the Acer to have it serviced. I guess my only real option now is to try to use an adapter to change the DVI cable to a VGA one and plug it into the VGA port on the monitor.
All I wanted was to use this monitor how it is intended to be used out of the box while connected with the included DVI cable. Can’t even have that!
Parting Thoughts
My recommendation? Skip this monitor. I hate to say it, but even at the $100 or so price I paid for it, I’m not happy with it. I realize that it’s a budget monitor so it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of other monitors, but its biggest glaring problem is the DVI defect and I wouldn’t have bought it had I known that this manufacturing defect existed. If you’re not convinced that this is a very real issue, try searching for “acer no signal” and you’ll find plenty of people complaining about it. I just wish I knew to search for those exact parameters before I bought it instead of general Acer x213W reviews.
It’s funny because around this same time, my brother’s LCD monitor broke as well, and because he’s a developer, he needed that second monitor badly. He also wanted one that could pivot to portrait mode so he could look at more lines of code. I recommended my brother to get the Samsung 2243BWX for $190 from Newegg. He seems quite pleased with it.
If you’re looking for a 22″ monitor on the cheap, you can probably find this Acer x213W for around $150 or so, but I’d say spring a little more for the Samsung 2243BWX. While it costs more, think about all of the extra features you are getting: the Samsung brand (obviously superior to Acer, as I’ll never buy an Acer product again), a slightly larger screen, the ability to adjust the height of your LCD monitor and pivot it, as well as a USB ports on the monitor itself. If I could go back in time, I would return the Acer monitor and get the Samsung one for my wife. Fortunately, she’s not the most tech-savy so she doesn’t feel the same regret I do for this purchase, but you live and learn. Don’t make my mistake!
