Acer P223W

Out of the box the Acer had washy colours. The one-touch contrast control, ‘Empowering Technology’ is generally woeful, but does empower you to fix it manually and after a quick tweak you can get good colour. It also has a smooth colour gradient with no banding and almost all the levels in the greyscale test. The adaptive contrast management doesn’t actually do a lot other than play with the brightness, which became a little irritating in dark movies. We left it off.

Our biggest complaint would be the glossy finish to the screen, which becomes very frustrating if there are any light sources behind you. Seeing your reflection in dark scenes probably wasn’t in any directors’ vision either.

The P223w was one of the few monitors without backlight bleeding and blacks were blacker than on any other monitor. Add to this the vibrant colour of the glossy screen and games looked excellent, but this is the only redeeming feature of going glossy. If the native resolution is beyond your graphics card (if you’re connecting it to, say, an Eee PC), downscaled modes are still quite good.

It’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but it looks great, runs well and, dressed in ‘piano black’ would be a welcome addition to your mantelpiece. As for your desk, we’re not quite convinced.