The biggest surprise though was the connectivity or lack of it. The Acer has a single VGA, D-Sub connector - and that's it. For a monitor that's capable of 1,920 x 1,200 the lack of DVI is something of a shock, especially as you'd want to maximise quality at this relatively high resolution. Again this compares very poorly with the Dell, which sports, D-Sub, DVI (HDCP compliant), composite, S-Video, and Component. The Dell even shows off with side-mounted card reader slots.

But what about screen performance? After taking the Acer out of the box and just plugging it in, I was immediately struck by the lack of vividness is the image. It just seemed dull. However, if you move round the OSD, you can select between Warm, Cool and User settings. Cool gives everything a blue tinge, and Warm was what the panel was set to. The User setting enables you to adjust the RGB levels and put some much needed vividness back into the image.

What gamers might be tempted by is the response time, which Acer quotes as being 6ms from grey to grey. Playing games in the screen and for video I had no issues with fast motion. The contrast ratio is given as 1000:1, which is very high for an LCD. These figures don't mean that much as there isn't a fixed standard for contrast ratios but there's no doubting that this was another strong point of the display.