Acer Ferrari F-20

Normal monitors jut not doing it for you? How about some gloss and a Ferrari badge?

Acer has been pimping its Ferrari co-branded products in a few different areas, and the latest, the F-20, is a sexy bit of kit indeed. Initially we pulled it out of the box to take a quick look, then left it on the table as we tied up some unfinished business before the review process commenced – during which everyone that passed by in Atomic HQ stopped in their tracks, then commented on how beautiful it was, or mentioned something about loins and stirring. The eye-catching red flies in the face of the black and silver combinations that we see everywhere today, making sure that the monitor stands out, and probably always will, among the crowd.

Apart from the mirror-finished black, Ferrari logo sitting on the front speaker grill, and the aforementioned red, this monitor is for all intents and purposes a re-badged Acer AL2032W with pretty bits, down to the specs. If you want to save $200 and still get the performance, you know where to go.

Inputs are plentiful, running the full gamut of DVI, VGA, component, composite, S-Video and some associated audio ports. The video input can be easily switched by a button sitting underneath the monitor’s bezel.

Menu buttons are seated on the side, which is usually annoying but the functions are marked clearly on the front and aligned with the buttons, which are large enough to find blindly and easy to press – the up and down menu selection button usefully grooved in the middle so you can easily discern which is which. For once, a rare combination of form and function has been found in a monitor.

Unfortunately there is only one form of adjustment, being tilt. There is no height adjustment which we would expect for a monitor of this size, however it gets away with having no swivel adjustment by being light enough to shift the whole unit.



The screen is high gloss – something that falls into the personal taste arena, with just as many people liking it as those who prefer the ‘matte’ looking LCDs. The downside of course is that it’s quite reflective, with the fluoros in Labs getting in the way of gameplay, although you soon get used to it.

The F-20 whirled through the DisplayMate tests, able to reach a 3 black and displaying all the way up to the maximum 255 white. This slight heaviness in the blacks carried on throughout the rest of the tests, however as a by-product offered a nice deep black not often seen in LCDs. Motion and gaming was fine, with both the HDTV and Quake 4 tests performing admirably. In fact we’d have to say this is the best 20” LCD to cross our desks to date.

Accessories include the required power brick, cables for every input on the monitor, and as a nice touch, a LCD cleaning cloth. A panel on the neck can flip back for cable management if needed.

The speakers are the usual monitor speaker trollop – we wish they’d stop doing this, especially on performance oriented monitors where any enthusiast worth their salt will have a decent set of speakers anyway, not to mention it might knock a few dollars off the final price. Unfortunately for the office crowd, integration is the buzzword. We’d love to be a part of any office that had these as standard, however we expect they’re far and few between.

The Acer Ferrari F-20 is an excellent monitor that not only performs well, but manages to look stunning at the same time. If you need to set yourself apart, you could do worse than shacking up with one of these.