Acer T231H Multi-Touch

Page 1 - Introduction, Design, Features, OSD

Acer hopes that its 23-inch Full-HD multi-touch monitor will sway you towards the premium priced Acer T231H. It does alright for the targeted purpose - communicating with your PC over a Touch-screen user interface.

Touch does work, although idiosyncrasies of the OS (Windows 7 in our case) comes in the way. The touch screen is sensitive enough to detect input (from finger or any soft pointing device) even half-a-millimetre off the surface, and sensible enough to not take random "hard presses" as input. Accuracy was pretty good, with no lag seen when using touch-enabled (or even normal) applications. A USB cable connecting the monitor to the PC (or laptop) conveys input to the PC. But you are not going to keep using the touch interface all the time, beyond the novelty first few days. So besides the touch, what else did we find in the Acer T231H monitor?

The oddest part of this monitor has to be the placement of its OSD buttons.

Design and Features
The T231H is a widescreen monitor with an aspect ratio of 16:9 and a Full-HD resolution of 1920x1080, also known as a 1080p display. It offers a (grey-to-grey) response time of 2ms, uses a TN panel (Twisted Nematic) like most monitors available, and a horizontal/vertical viewing angle of 160 degrees. Package contents comprised of two manuals, a CD, and VGA/DVI/Audio/power cables.

This monitor is decidedly confused about whether it wants to be stylish, or frumpy. It does away with a traditional stand - there are foot stands at the front and an "ergonomic" prop at the rear to hold it in place and to change (tilt) viewing angle. Yet it does not manage to particularly look stylish, nor is the monitor as thin as current-gen TN panel ones. The glossy screen is strikingly shiny when new, and sadly prone to fingerprints due its nature of usage as a touch screen display. The bezel is as glossy as the screen is shiny, and its thickness is as usually seen on most monitors. All edges are rounded. VESA wall-mounting is supported.

As usual, the rear bottom has the display input connectors - VGA, DVI and HDMI. There is also an Audio-In jack, which along with the HDMI port offers two ways of using the integrated speakers. The two 1.5W speakers were ordinary as expected, with treble/bass and audio quality being nothing to write home about. Acer offers a three year warranty on this monitor.

On-Screen Display
The oddest part of this monitor has to be the placement of its OSD (On-screen Display) buttons. The power button is at the side-bottom-right corner, and the OSD buttons are situated at the bottom right, facing downwards. It takes just a minute to get used to the button placement. The OSD interface itself had the usual set of operations and looked unremarkable. The poor usability comfort seemed to indicate that the OSD was not intended to be used much.



Review Index
Page 1 - Introduction, Design, Features, OSD (you are here)
Page 2 - Performance, Conclusion
Table Listing - Specifications
Table Listing - Performance