Home > Consumer Reviews > Acer X233H bid 23-Inch LCD Monitor

If I could give this product zero stars I would.

I bought this from Amazon, via TigerDirect in April '09. I had gift coupons to use and the price was good, and I thought if I had any problems Amazon, being the company they are, would be supportive if anything went wrong; however this was a mistake on my part, because it went through TigerDirect, and their return policy was 30 days, after which you had to deal with the manufacturer directly - Acer.

After a few weeks of happy ownership, the display freaked out - colors were completely distorted, and white lines were appearing on the display. I contacted Acer, they made me ship it back on my own dime (on a six week old monitor, let's not forget). I received the monitor two weeks later and they said they couldn't find anything wrong with it. I had a WTH moment, plugged it in, it worked fine.

I used the monitor for two more weeks and the problem came back again. I emailed their customer support, the person suggested I try a few things. It worked. Another week went by and the problem happened again.

Since the problem was intermittent, it took a while trying various things to see if I was doing anything to cause the problem. In the end, I couldn't figure out any rhyme or reason for the problem, other than a component was failing somewhere. I tried four different computers (two desktops, two laptops) and four OS's (XP, Vista, Ubuntu, OSX). Even without a computer plugged in, it shows the corruption.

When I contacted Acer support again, I found that the support people weren't properly reading or understanding my emails. On two occasions they thought I was complaining about a laptop or a computer. Everyone I spoke to was Indian, so it seems there was a language problem. After several emails and voice calls, I was informed that I had to pay for shipping *every time* the monitor had to go back, even if it's because of Acer's fault.

The whole support process is very frustrating. Spend the money on a Dell S2409W, you can get them for about the same price when they go on special (24", and the stand tilts!) - at least that way you know you're dealing with a company with a reputable support infrastructure. It's what I should've bought in the beginning.

Decent monitor unless you get one with a bad component. I'm still trying to get Acer to repair their product and stand by their warranty.

This monitor works well on my PC. The picture quality is good and there are no dead pixels. Also, for a monitor that you use on a desktop this is probably about as big as you want to get. You'd have to move further away from the monitor if you got something much bigger than this...

Maybe I'm being a bit too critical, but if I could change anything about this monitor, is just that it'd have a 2ms refresh rate. Being 5ms is pretty cool though for every day use. Colors are bright and vivid. Having the three types of inputs is a great option too.

Overall this is a great monitor for the price. The image quality is good, the refresh rate is adequate for most applications, and the smallish black frame looks good and is not distracting. The only problem is that there are a couple of dead 'bright' pixels near each other about an inch from the bottom and centered on the screen that are noticeable with dark backgrounds. I looked for dead pixels when I first received this product and regret not checking more carefully and again right before the Amazon 30 day return period as I would have returned it had they shown up by then. If I needed another monitor soon, I would still buy one of these. Hint: An easy way to check for dark pixels in windows is to right click on the desktop > properties > screen saver > blank > preview. There are a lot of test images out there, but bright pixels are all I really care about for my applications. I'll probably put dots of ink over the pixels to black them out after waiting a bit to see if enough appear to get Acer to replace the monitor. Cheers!

I have had this monitor about a month. I am very happy with it. The price was great and it works perfectly.