Acer B326HUL review

32in monitors aren’t a particularly common sight on the desks of homes and offices, with this size of screen usually reserved for bedroom TVs, but after a few hours with the Acer B326HUL’s huge 2,560×1,440 panel we could certainly begin to see the point; with a screen with this high a resolution, bigger is often better.

With a monitor with this many pixels, you can fit a huge amount on the screen at once, so working on multiple applications at the same time is simple. The advantage of the large size is that you won’t have to scale your fonts and applications up to make them easy to read; a 32in display gives you all the desktop space with none of the squinting at icons or text.

The monitor is heavy and feels sturdy, and has a generous amount of height and tilt adjustment to help you get the right viewing angle. The monitor can be rotated, but the turntable that allows you to do this is under the base. This means that when you rotate the screen, the entire base moves too, which could cause problems if you’re short on desk space.

On the side of the display are a pair of USB3 ports, and two more can be found on the back beside the display inputs. USB3 hubs are becoming increasingly common on more expensive screens, and they’re certainly useful; having USB3 ports on your monitor means you can benefit from high-speed data transfers while leaving your desktop PC on the floor. Also on the back of the screen are DVI, DisplayPort and a pair of HDMI inputs.

The screen performed extremely well in our tests. Out of the box the monitor’s VA panel showed a very high degree of colour accuracy, displaying 100 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is a perfect score and means you’ll be able to get on with using the monitor without worrying about calibration.

Our colour calibration tool recorded a high contrast ratio of 2553:1, while black levels were a very low 0.1cd/m2. These impressive figures translated into excellent subjective image quality; colours in our test photographs were bright and vibrant, while our solid colour tests showed greens, blues and particularly reds to be strong and vivid. Details in both bright and dark areas of our test photos were clear and crisp, while blacks appeared strong and inky thanks to the minimal amount of light leaking through from the screen’s backlight.

The display’s specifications claim the screen has 178-degree viewing angles both vertically and horizontally, but in reality images in the corners of the screen furthest from your eyes look slightly darker than on the rest of the panel. This is a difficult problem to solve, as using the height adjustment on the screen will help, but will also most likely make the top or bottom of the screen uncomfortably high or low for normal use, even with the monitor placed a couple of feet away from you.

The contrast change is minor, so it’s not a huge problem, but if you rely on absolute colour accuracy across the entire panel, you’ll need a monitor with better viewing angles than this one.

The Acer B326HUL is a great 32-inch screen which performs well in every area. We would heartily recommend it were it not for the BenQ BL3200PT, which is slightly cheaper and has more comprehensive image tweaking options as well as slightly better build quality, so remains our high-resolution 32in choice.