Acer B223WBydr review

Fully adjustable stands are surprisingly rare, so we were pleased to see one on Acer’s B223WBydr.

The stand lifts through 11cm and pivots to portrait mode, which is great for working on long word-processing documents. Impressively, the monitor’s bezel is only 15mm thick, which is ideal if you want to line two of them up side by side and extend your desktop.

This is the only 22in monitor here with a USB hub. The two-port model is great for plugging in your keyboard and mouse or for connecting a USB flash drive. Together with the 1W stereo speakers, this makes the B223WBydr seem big on features.

It’s a little strange, particularly at this price, that there’s only an analogue VGA input and no digital input. Fortunately, when we connected our PC the monitor’s auto-adjust configured the picture perfectly. The only thing we had to adjust was the colour settings, although this is common for all monitors.

Fortunately, the control buttons are on the front and clearly labelled, so we had no trouble switching to User colour, making some adjustments and raising the brightness and contrast to improve the gloomy out-of-the-box picture.

The B223WBydr did well in our image-quality tests, with only its fairly muted white and black test screens worthy of criticism. This isn’t a monitor to blow your mind with its contrast, despite the quoted 10,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio. That said, gradients were smooth and the backlight was even, while the colour tone was accurate on the whole. We found that video was a little smooth for our liking, though.

Whether these few weaknesses put you off the B223WBydr will depend on how important the adjustable stand is. For most people, BenQ’s E2200HD is a better buy. It costs £32 less and has a higher native resolution of 1,920×1,080.