Acer H243Hbmid review

The price may be similar to other 24in monitors, but the 1,920×1,080 H243Hbmid’s quality elevates it to much higher ground. This is one of the best-quality displays that we’ve seen.

The important thing with this display is to ignore the preset image modes, which we found produced poor contrast and saturated images. Switch the monitor to standard mode and adjust its settings manually, and its a completely different beast.

We connected a Blu-ray player to the display’s HDMI port and turned on Acer’s Adaptive Contrast Management, which gives a dynamic contrast ratio of 40,000:1. This works extremely well, bringing out full detail in all the scenes we watched. We ended up with dark blacks, bright, shining whites and tons of detail in every scene.

Colours were fantastic, too. They were vibrant and pleasing to the eye across the entire spectrum. Flesh tones looked great, reproducing fine detail in people’s faces. The high quality continued when we switched to a PC through a DVI input, and the H243Hbmid’s bright image was always pleasing to look at.

Stereo 2W speakers are built into the display. They deliver enough volume for a small room and are punchy enough for occasional use, but the bass falls flat, as you’d expect from an integrated set. If you want sound quality that matches the image quality, we recommend investing in a decent set of stereo or surround-sound speakers.

Our only problem with this display is the touch-sensitive controls. They registered our every touch, but cycling through menus is considerably slower than with dedicated buttons, and it’s easy to hit the wrong button as there’s no feedback. This is a minor complaint, though, as once you’ve set up the monitor the way you want it, you won’t have to go back into the onscreen menus very often.

Cheaper 24in monitors are available, but nothing with this degree of image quality. Only by the virtue of the Samsung 2494HM’s adjustable stand and top-notch image quality does this display miss out on an award.