The Acer AL1751W may have had the distinction of being the only widescreen 17in TFT in this roundup, but this wasn’t the only thing that contributed to its high rankings. Instead it was a combination of the unit’s specifications, its functions and its features that helped it score highly across our strenuous testing regime, plus a little nudge from value for money at the end to get it across the line.
While the AL1751W had a standard 25ms (millisecond) response time, this didn’t appear as obvious in our real-world testing, possibly because the imagery presented was of such a clear and clean nature. The AL1751W managed this trick with an awesome 450cd/m² brightness rating and a whopping 600:1 contrast ratio -- the highest we’d yet encountered for a TFT display. And of course there’s the widescreen aspect to this that made movies, gaming, and dare we suggest, spreadsheeting, a pleasure.
In all of our testing this display was in the lead pack, with high scores where it counted -- sharpness and resolution, colour and greyscale and the real-world tests. If there was a letdown it was with 3D gaming: if your game won’t support widescreen resolutions of 1,280 x 768 it’ll crop the res down to the centre of the screen to 1,024 x 768, a far cry from the 1,280 x 1,024 managed by all the other screens.
Another potential drawback was that this display cost just shy of a grand -- a lot of money for a 17in TFT. However this was tempered in our scoring by a decent pixel warranty which made it an even better value for money purchase.
Although not taken into consideration when scoring and ranking this screen, Acer was offering, for an extra $45, the chance to upgrade to its ‘Pixel Perfect’ guarantee, which essentially guaranteed that the screen would be defect free for the term of the warranty, putting it into line with the Sony and the CMV.