>>Hey everyone, this is Eric Franklin from CNET.com and today we're taking a first look at the Acer T230H. Now we've gotten a lot of monitors with oval shaped foot stands lately and the Acer is the first in a while that includes the bird foot style stand and I like to call it. No. Not feeling the whole bird foot thing. No. You people have no imagination. Anyway, knocking the display from the sides you'll get minimum wobbling as those wide bird toes and its hefty 17-pound weight kept the display fairly grounded. The Acer includes the ergonomic trifecta of height adjustment, swivel and tilt but no pivot unfortunately. On the neck of the stand is a hole for routing cords that keeps them neat and tighty. The neck can also be removed from the four screw holes and the display mounted on the wall, VESA-style. Connection options include HDMI, DVI, VGA and one USB upstream port. The OSD array includes five presets and controls for brightness, contrast and color temperature and the option to change the red, green and blue values individually. We tested Acer with its DVI connection and found that overall it has good DisplayMate performance but it did display some overt clouding in our dark screen tests.
However, the biggest performance issue of the T230H is its tendency to display images with a noticeable green tint. The tint is diminished when using a warm color temperature but in the user preset it's very apparent. This showed up in movies especially when we directly compared it to the Samsung XL2370. Also when viewing in the user preset we notice the monitor over saturates colors in your peak white but in the warm preset the saturation isn't anywhere near as pronounced and the colors are more accurate.
Games had no signs of input lag or any streaking or ghosting during fast movement. Colors in games look muted compared to the full and vibrant colors we saw in the XL2370 however. The Acer includes touch screen support when running on a Windows 7 system and thanks to Windows 7 support for large icons we were able to accurately click them for the most part although we still preferred the mouse for all applications. Also, since the screen doesn't tilt back 90 degrees, you'll find that your arms get fatigued quite easily after only a few minutes of use as you hold them out in front of you. The Acer 230H is a 24-inch touch screen monitor available as low as $360. Unfortunately, its performance, though not near the worse we've seen, can't compete the likes of the Samsung SyncMaster XL2370 in games or movies. The Acer 230H, its disappointing performance means we can't recommend it over cheaper, better performing monitors like the XL2370.
For more information, check out the full review at CNET.com. Once again, this is Eric Franklin and this has been the first look at the Acer T230H.
