Acer T232HL - Touch Comes to the Desktop
by Chris Heinonen on February 6, 2013 9:00 AM ESTColor Quality and Gamut
Straight out of the box, the best numbers that the Acer can produce on our Gretag Macbeth test are pretty poor. The average dE is over 8, and the grayscale numbers are the worst that I’ve measured. The only shade even close to being an ideal number is yellow, with everything else having an error of 5 or above.
For our calibration tests we use ColorEyes Display Pro, an i1Pro meter, and we target 200 nits of light output, a gamma of 2.2, a white point of D65, and the minimum black level we can hit. Any adjustments that we can make in the monitor to correct white balance or colors are done before the calibration, and the best starting mode is used. I always try calibrations with and without DDC enabled in ColorEyes Display Pro, but haven’t run into a result in a long time where hand tuning it was better than using DDC; they are usually identical.
After calibration, the Acer is really improved. The grayscale has gone from abysmal to very accurate, and the remaining flaws are in shades of blue that almost always cause monitors trouble. If you care about color quality, you really do need to calibrate the Acer as without a calibration, the colors are just far from ideal.
After that calibration we target 100 nits, which is more likely to be used with print or paper work than with on screen design work. We don’t get quite as good of results here, and the grayscale error is a good bit higher than before as well. It isn’t poor, but it’s not as good as other monitors can do, but this display also isn’t targeted towards print professionals.
So we have really poor initial color, very nice post-calibration color, and so-so calibration color for print work. If you really care about color quality then you’re going to want to calibrate it, and even if you don’t the level of error is high enough that it might be a bit distracting, especially since the grayscale is so bad.
The gamut is supposed to be sRGB and here it comes up just a little bit short. We look for 71% of AdobeRGB to be equal to sRGB, but we only get 68% of the AdobeRGB gamut here. This also comes in near the bottom of the monitors recently reviewed, and isn’t too unexpected due to the LED lighting which often falls short.
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zero2dash - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
Horrible decision.That thing will be filthy in hours.
Flunk - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
You can't have a touchscreen with a matte finish, the two features have to go together. If you don't like it you can always get a matte non-touchscreen there are lots of those on the market.JanieMartin - Thursday, February 7, 2013 - link
Love my job, since I've been bringing in $5600… I sit at home, music playing while I work in front of my new iMac that I got now that I'm making it online.(Click Home information)http://goo.gl/q9r5k
Beaver M. - Thursday, February 7, 2013 - link
Funny, I have one of those right here. Works fine. Given it is also transflexive, but it is matte.Beaver M. - Thursday, February 7, 2013 - link
Transflective of course.shtldr - Thursday, February 7, 2013 - link
I've seen a matte touch desktop display about 7 years ago. It was probably the resistive type as one had to use some force.Not sure if they're still being produced with all this tablet/smartphone glass capacitive fad of late, but they can be had.
Tams80 - Friday, February 8, 2013 - link
Absolute rubbish! I'm using a Tablet PC with a matte touchscreen right now.roberto.tomas - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link
Is that true for proj. capacitive as well as optical? 2-point multitouch systems should probably need glossy, because they are optical. But 10-point is usually more expensive projective capacitive (and I didn't know if they needed matted too).My take on the monitor: horrible, disturbingly bad color gamut for a monitor that is glossy. The sRGB % for this thing is as low as a $60 commodity 11.6" laptop matte from AUO. But; full 10-point multitouch in the sub-$1 grand range, good range of pivot, and not entirely small 23". I'm lukewarm to the thing, if it went onf half off sale I might pick one up ... maybe.
Homeles - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
Read the article, genius:"I worried a lot about fingerprints and smudges with the glossy finish, but I didn’t find myself having to clean it that often, and typically they were hidden away well."
zero2dash - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
When you grow up, have sex, and have kids, you'll realize that glossy screens get fingerprints all over them.Maybe this monitor works for 1 person who cleans their hands every five minutes.
In a normal household with more than 1 person and normal use, the thing would be filthy in no more than 24 hours. I have fingerprints on all my monitors, flat screens, and every other glossy screen device in our house...and half of those devices aren't even touch screens.