Acer S230HL Abii

With the Acer S230HL Abii ($189 list) you don't have to sacrifice style or screen real estate to stay within your budget. This attractive 23-inch LED backlit monitor has a super-slim profile and delivers a bright, colorful 1,920-by-1,080 picture, but its grayscale and viewing angle performance are less than stellar. However you get two HDMI ports, which is rare for a monitor in this price range, and it doesn't require much power.

Design and Features
Like its predecessor, the Acer S231HL ($199 list, 3 stars), the S230HL Abii has a very thin profile. The black cabinet is only half an inch thick around the top and sides but expands to around one inch at the bottom where the ports are mounted. Speaking of ports, this model offers two HDMI inputs and a VGA input. Having dual HDMI ports makes it easy to connect to a gaming console and a Blu-ray ray player simultaneously without having to swap cables.

Slender glossy black bezels frame the 23 inch TN+ panel, which has a matte anti-glare coating. This is a budget monitor and as such doesn't have USB ports, a card reader, or an ergonomic stand. The round base does offer tilt adjustability, however.

There are five buttons located beneath the right side of the lower bezel including a power switch, a menu/enter button, left/right menu navigation controls, an auto adjust/exit button, and an Acer e-Empowering button. The e-Empowering button toggles through five picture presets including Standard, ECO, Movie, Graphics, and User. I tested the S230HL Abii in Standard mode, which offers the best all-around picture for everyday use in a typical home/small office lighting environment. Picture settings are basic; you can adjust contrast, brightness, and color temperature as well as clock and focus (in analog mode only), dynamic contrast ratio, aspect ratio, and DDC/CI (Display Data Channel/Command Interface). The S230HL Abii comes with a three year warranty and ships with HDMI and VGA cables, a paper Quick Start guide, and a CD containing a comprehensive User Guide.

Performance
The S230HL Abii delivered well-defined, uniform colors on the DisplyMate Color Scales and Uniformity tests but had trouble with dark and light shades of gray. There was clipping at the light end of the scale in the 64-Step Grayscale test which caused the last two swatches to go from a moderately light shade of gray to white, essentially skipping a shade. Dark grayscale performance was similar although not as pronounced as what I saw at the light end of the scale. The panel had no trouble displaying small fonts set to 5.3 points on the Scaled Fonts test.

The S230HL Abii's 5-ms pixel response handled motion with aplomb; I was unable to detect motion blur or lag while playing Need for Speed: Carbon while connected to my PS3. Likewise, the movie Death Race 2 on Blu-ray disc played smoothly and image detail was sharp, although some shadow detail appeared a bit murky. Viewing angles were relatively narrow; color shifting occurred at around 45-degrees from center when viewed from the sides and was much narrower while viewing from the top and bottom. You'll want to keep this monitor at eye level for the best possible picture.

The S230HL Abii used 26 watts of power during my testing, which is decent but not as energy efficient as the Lenovo LS2421P Wide ($219.99 direct, 4 stars), which used 16 watts. However, if you enable the S230HL Abii's ECO picture mode you can cut energy consumption down to 19 watts and still enjoy a relatively bright picture, which is why it receives our Greentech stamp of approval.

You don't get much in the way of bells and whistles with the Acer S230HL Abii, but for around $190 you get good color, two HDMI connections, and full HD capabilities in a slim 23 inch cabinet. It can't touch the color and viewing angle quality of our current Editors' Choice for budget monitors, the Asus VS229H-P ($160 list, 4 stars), but it is a good deal nonetheless, especially if you want to connect to two HDMI-enabled devices at the same time.

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Acer S230HL Abii with several other monitors side by side.

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