Acer G225HQ review: Acer G225HQ

Taking design cues from Acer's own Predator gaming desktop, the G225HQ looks like it would be at home on Batman's desk, the striking angular design and mixed gloss with matte black adding up to one serious-looking monitor.

7.8

Acer G225HQ

The Good

Aggressive styling. What's an input lag?. Attractive price.

The Bad

Horizontal viewing angle is 10° less than TN usually gives. Glossy screen. Limited control in the OSD. Bottom-mounted buttons.

The Bottom Line

The G225HQ is nothing special, but it'll likely appeal to twitch gamers with next to zero input lag, its aggressive styling and affordable price. It's just a shame it's a gloss screen.

With such a gaming-oriented design then, it's interesting that Acer has opted for a gloss screen over a matte, which although looks pretty on a shelf it does tend to reflect an awful lot. The G225HQ is no different — if the screen is showing something dark, you can clearly see yourself.

At first glance the G225HQ offers nothing outstanding apart from its looks — but let's see if we can find something else under the gothic exterior.

Villain: "Who are you?" Acer: "I'm Bat monitor!" (Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

Specs at a glance

Stand and ergonomics

At first we got excited that the G225HQ might have swivel capabilities thanks to the circular section in the middle of the base; this wasn't to be. The stand supports tilt only.

No matter how much we wished, it wouldn't swivel. It does tilt, however.
(Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

Connections

DVI, VGA and a power socket on the other side. If it were any more spartan, we'd suddenly find ourselves growing abs. (Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

Buttons and on-screen display (OSD)

The only thing more evil than side buttons are buttons under a monitor, and that's exactly what Acer has done here. Thankfully, you can hit any button and it will call up the menu, which in turn will display context-sensitive menus. The theory is sound; however, the experience is clunky and inconvenient, due to the positioning of the menu items, the iconography involved and the location of the buttons themselves.

Bottom-mounted buttons. The evolutionary retrograde of side-mounted buttons, the evolutionary retrograde of front-mounted buttons. Those dots aren't lights, by the way, so the buttons are completely invisible with the lights out. (Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

Once you wrap your fingers around navigation, Acer's OSD is reasonably simple to follow, in part due to its lack of options. All the staples are there, from brightness to contrast, user colour, pointless display presets ("User", "Text", "Standard", "Graphics" and "Movie", all under the "eColor Management" heading) — but seemingly nothing to differentiate it from any other panel. The only OSD option, for example, is the time-out, with nary an opacity option in sight.

The G225HQ's OSD is clean, through virtue of only containing basic level options. (Screenshot by Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

Acer offers two scaling modes: "Full" and "Aspect". You'll find no 1:1 setting here.

Performance

Lagom.nl LCD tests
After calibrating to a target brightness of 140cd/m² with an X-Rite i1Display 2, Eye-One Match 3 and tweaking with HCFR, the G225HQ was run through the Lagom.nl LCD tests.

Input lag
Measured against a Samsung SyncMaster 975p CRT, and using a Canon 40D set to a shutter speed of 1/320, an average of over 60 photographs were taken using Virtual Stopwatch Pro. The average result over DVI came in as 2.53ms, meaning almost no input lag. The largest difference measured between the two screens was 29ms, although the vast majority were simply zeroes.

Colour accuracy
ΔE is the measurement of how far a measured colour deviates from its expected value, allowing us to determine the colour accuracy of a monitor. While a ΔE value of 1 is considered perceivable, as long as it's less than 3 the shift shouldn't be too obvious. HCFR was used to determine ΔE for the monitor.

In uncalibrated format, the Dell wasn't the worst we'd seen, but it wasn't great either. Note that we turned dynamic contrast ratio off for these tests.

The uncalibrated CIE chart. The white triangle is the colour space of the monitor, the dark is the sRGB gamut it's trying to match. (Screenshot by CBS Interactive)

Yep, the greyscale looks more than a little off. Let's see if we can at least correct that, since we don't have the granularity to attack the colours themselves.

The calibrated CIE chart (Screenshot by CBS Interactive)

Not the worst result we've seen for an entry-level TN screen, but certainly not the best either — the G225HQ continues on its path to be middle of the road.

Viewing angles
Viewing angles were taken with a Canon 40D in spot metering mode, with only shutter time adjusted to obtain a good exposure.

Like the Dell SX2210t, colours seem to start inverting a little too early when viewing from below. (Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

Backlight uniformity
Backlight uniformity was measured by placing HCFR into free measure mode, displaying a completely white image and recording the brightness along a 5x3 grid on the screen. This should be considered a guide only, as backlight uniformity is likely to change from unit to unit.

While these may look like big differences, in subjective use the differences weren't apparent. (Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

Light bleed
With all the lights turned off and a black image shown, there was white glow coming from the top and the bottom of the monitor, as well as a faint glow from the right-hand side. Sadly, this is common among cheaper screens.

It's important to note that the effects of light bleed will likely change from monitor to monitor, regardless of make.

Other issues
The panel itself is quite deeply inset, and the bezel is piano black, meaning that during bright scenes you may notice the screen's reflection on the bezel, which will be distracting for some.

Power consumption
We measured power consumption using a Jaycar mains digital power meter. It's important to note here that due to limitations of the meter, measurements are limited to values of 1W and greater, and are reported in 1W increments.

All measurements, screen brightness and contrast were set to 100 per cent, and a test image displayed.

Juice Box
Maximum power draw	39W
Power-saving mode	7W
Off	7W

That's a pretty heavy max draw — there's definitely more efficient monitors out there.

Warranty

Conclusion

The G225HQ is nothing special, but it'll likely appeal to twitch gamers with next to zero input lag, its aggressive styling and affordable price. It's just a shame it's a gloss screen. Despite its RRP, it can be found for around AU$200 online.