Acer AL1714CB-8 17" LCD Monitor

Before we begin, we would like to remind everyone that LCD performance testing can be rather subjective depending upon personal preferences and due to image compression, camera lighting, and other such photographic settings that some of these photos displayed aren’t representative of real world viewing of LCDs as most of you probably are aware. After hooking up the LCD and properly configuring our xorg.conf with the appropriate monitor information, we were ready to begin testing. Right off the bat, in our initial testing we found our AL1714 review unit to be free of visual imperfections such as dead pixels and unbalanced brightness.

Before hitting up this LCD with some gaming, we first ran AbiWord 2.2, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, and The GIMP 2.2.7. When running these office-oriented tasks at the LCD’s native resolution of 1280 x 1024, we encountered absolutely no problems but then again these office applications aren’t the most visually demanding. We found the text in each of the different applications to be clear although the monitor lacks a DVI connection. On with video playback, the video we watched was The Bourne Identity using Mplayer 1.0pre7 and XINE.

As for the games to stretch the visual limits of the LCD, we settled for some Doom 3 (1.3.1302), Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo (3334), Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (2.60), and even a bit of SuperTux (0.1.2). During this time, we were very impressed by the display. Although we weren’t able to tell any differences in the response time, compared to the AL1715b, we were able to see a significant improvement in the brightness of the display. At this time we also noticed the limitations with the horizontal and vertical viewing angle; when looking at the display from a variety of different angles. However, when looking at the display head on we encountered no display discrepancies.