Handling

In the past, Acer's F series--the 'F' is for Ferrari--was the most expensive part of the manufacturer's range, designed to appeal to the most demanding of gamers.

Recently, though, prices have fallen, and the F-22 is the latest addition to the series, with a frame that's as glossy as the screen it encloses.  On the back, an etched panel with the Ferrari logo and a serial number--suggesting that there is only a production run of 9000 of these monitors.  Three inputs are available, with VGA, DVI and HDMI representing an increasingly popular trio for monitor manufacturers.  What's missing is Display Port, which Apple (and others) are trying to popularise. The stand, too, has been given a glossy look, but isn't very flexible, only allowing the screen to turn a few degrees from side to side.


The OSD interface uses touchscreen controls, which would usually imply a lot of frustration, but, fortunately, Acer's engineers seem to have finally got it right with the F-22, whose menus work like a treat.

By default, the colours and the contrast levels are reasonably good, even if there is a slight dominance of blue shades.  This weakness in the factory settings can be corrected by turning the brightness down to 55 and fixing the contrast at 50.  Then turn the blue down to 72 and you'll reach a DeltaE score of just 2.9, showing a very close relationship between the colors sent to the monitor and those it actually shows.


Thanks to a very fast response time and good contrast, movies look good, with only a very small amount of distortion.  Nevertheless, the lack of a graphics correction chip means that there are some problems--but they're easily avoided if you sit around a meter and a half back when watching a DVD.