Acer Aspire R7-571 review

We’ve tested plenty of touchscreen laptops in recent months, but the Acer Aspire R7-571 is quite unlike anything else we’ve seen before. Not only is the keyboard located below the touchpad, but the screen’s unique “Ezel” hinge gives it an unprecedented amount of flexibility. It can pivot 180 degrees like the Dell XPS 12, lie almost completely flat like the Sony VAIO Duo 13, hover parallel to the keyboard if you want to use the laptop standing up or you can move it forward to make the touchscreen more accessible.

It’s a clever piece of design, and the Aspire R7-571 is clearly designed to make the touchscreen as user-friendly as possible. However, we were more impressed by how sturdy it is between transitions. Pivots can be performed with just one finger, but you’ll need both hands to move the screen back and forth over the touchpad. The screen doesn’t wobble from side to side either, even when it’s lying parallel to the keyboard. The R7-571’s screen rotation was spot-on too, so we were never left with the Windows desktop facing the wrong way after we’d moved it from one position to another.

You don’t have to use the touchscreen, though, as the R7 also comes with a stylus and wireless mouse. This will be welcome news for those who want to keep messy fingerprints to a minimum. You don’t need to worry about scratching the screen with the stylus either, as the tip is encased in a small plastic disc. We thought this might make it difficult to use, but we were able to draw pictures and navigate the desktop without any problems. We can see it getting lost, though, as there’s nowhere to slot it into the chassis.

The bright 15.6in display is stunning. The touchscreen has a sharp 1,920×1,080 resolution and full 10-point touch support, making it a pleasure to use. We could execute Windows 8 gestures and multi-touch gestures with ease, and it was both accurate and responsive when tapping through icons and individual files on the desktop.

The R7-571 has the image quality to match, as our colour calibrator showed it was displaying 90.9 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is great for a laptop screen. Colours were rich and vibrant, and the screen’s glossy finish really made them jump out of the screen. Blacks were incredibly deep, which supported our low black level reading of 0.26cd/m2. Whites were bright and uniform across the screen. The R7-571’s viewing angles were fantastic too, and we could see the screen clearly from a variety of positions.

We recorded a contrast ratio of 1,188:1 with our colour calibrator, which is significantly higher than other high-end laptops we’ve tested, and all of our high contrast test photos showed plenty of detail in the both the light and dark areas of the screen.