Acer H235H

The Acer H235H is typical of this class of displays: It’s based on a six-bit TN panel that uses frame-rate control to augment its color depth. The screen delivers 23 inches of viewable area at a native resolution of 1920x1080.

As with nearly all the monitors we tested, we found it necessary to make significant adjustments to the display’s brightness and contrast settings to make the monitor look its best with our DisplayMate benchmark software. But the five touch-sensitive buttons in the Acer’s glossy black bezel and the obtuse icons in its onscreen display make this process extremely frustrating; the onscreen icons don’t line up precisely with the physical buttons and it takes too many button presses to drill down into each menu choice. It takes five button presses, for instance, to make a single brightness adjustment.

H235 display looks as attractive in back as it does in front, with a removeable panel to hide the ports.

The H235H performed well in DisplayMate’s dark-screen test, with almost no backlight leakage around the perimeter of the display, but we noticed significant banding in the 128-step grayscale test. It also did a poor job of reproducing low-saturated colors against light-gray backgrounds.

The display had no problems with smearing or blurring in our Blu-ray movie and game tests, but poor contrast resulted in a significant loss of visual detail in the opening scene of Watchmen.

The Acer H235H’s features and performance put it in the middle of the pack, but its three-year warranty is unusual in that it does not cover the backlight.