Acer H235H LCD Monitor

Acer has entered with a swanky new 23 incher LCD monitor, sporting a few brush strokes and extra hours in its aesthetic form. It’s called the H235H - a higher model than the previously reviewed H233H, this time with juicier rated specifications, which we will talk about shortly. There are already a lot of choices in this 23-24 inch monitor market, thus let’s see if this contemporary looking model can just nibble on market share, or actually usurp some glory.

Design and Features
The monitor comes fully wrapped in a gloss bezel, with a smoothly contoured back panel, tapering at the edges and bulging at the center. This back panel is not boring black, rather Acer has taken a feather out of LG’s cap, and made the back panel a darker shade of steel blue, this too with a glossy surface.

The speakers are at the bottom, and pump sound through a hidden vent which only is visible if you life the monitor up like a baby.  The whole frame comes perched on a round, similarly finished gloss black stand; with a joint that is decent in its grip but not super tight. There is a slight amount of wobbliness.

The screen can tilt up and down, but no swiveling is supported. The back panel has a very ubiquitous, large print of the Acer log, in a gleaming silver colored font. Overall the monitor does exude class, and surely looks quite modern and trendy. But the aesthetics are not the only thing with slick. The connectors available and features are also nice, with one HDMI in, DVI in, VGA in, and also a 3.5 mm EP audio in.The front right panel has touch sensitive buttons columned up, right above the power on switch LED, which itself is a push button located on the side. The LEDs are small, round, blue ones with a concentric ring around each of them.

As for rated specs, we have a 16:9, 1920 x 1080 screen, assumed to be a TN panel. The viewing angles are 160/160 degrees, while the dynamic contrast is a heavy 100,000:1. Brightness is measured at 300 cd/m2. The response time also sounds impressive at about 2 ms.

Performance
The first things we noticed is the UI, and its accessibility, ease of use etc. In today’s case with the H235H, we quite like the UI in terms of its simple design. It pops up where the buttons are, and arrows icons make navigation simpler, but not less time consuming, as it takes 5 button presses to reach and adjust brightness. The usual presets of test, movie, graphic and standard, were not so spectacular, thus we recommend taking a peek into the control and calibrating it yourself.

To do that, in the grayscale process, we found out that the monitor passes our 256 bar grayscale test, but not the black bar rotating test. Thus lower end of dynamic range is not depicted all that clearly. Merging of the black bars shows this. Also in pure black screens, there is backlight bleed. It’s noticeable, but very intolerable. At this price the panels do have bleed, I have seen it in other brands.

The backlight is very bright, that’s a good point, and also there is no coloration or tingeing at high white levels, thus whiter shades are depicted quite pure and clean. Even the displaymate color tracking tests yielded quite pure greys, thus the colors track more or less fine. It’s not dazzlingly vibrant though, we have seen brighter.

Colors are more or less neutral, with saturation levels hovering around hundred percent, in our HCFR and display mate software test. But in blue plugs, the high intensity bars merged in, and also very slight banding was noticed in full HD JPEGs. But this is on a level of nitpicking and testing, when we watched Ratatouille Blu-ray we had not much of a problem with the colors, it was quite neutral looking, but yes, the contrast between darker shades and lighter ones was skewed, as the blacks of this monitor are not well discerned.

Motion was the best part of this monitor. We played Prototype and Left for Dead, and had no input lag, or motion blur problems, at least not any to cry out loud about. Thus the healthy response time specification might be heeded as true.

Conclusion
The Acer H235H comes with an MRP of Rs.12,000 and MOP of Rs. 11,000, which is quite reasonable considering the performance. The only bad part was average greyscale rendition, it lacks dazzle.  Thus the contrast is not spectacular, but it is above average. Colors are neutral, no enhanced channels anywhere, except a little banding. Motion was very impressive, games and fast action movies will be a ball on this. A demo is recommended. Watch video below