Eight small widescreen monitors

Acer AL1916WAs

Acer offers its AL196W in two flavours, the AL196Ws and the AL1916WAs. The WAs benefits from a higher contrast compared to the Ws (700:1 instead of 500:1) and a faster response time, being 5 ms instead of 8 ms. Apart from that, these two monitors are identical- in fact they are outwardly identical. For this review, we inspected the silver version of the WAs. It's quite a basic monitor, with no inbuilt speakers or DVI port. The performance is generally good, although out of the box the monitor's display is a bit too blueish. The brightness is fine, and so is the response time with a measured 12 ms. With a recommended retail price of just 219 euros, the AL1916WAs is the second cheapest monitor in this test, making it an attractive choice.