Posted:2006-07-08 By lcd monitor Number of View:115651
LCD MONITOR REVIEW ACER FERRARI
F-19 19 INCH
By :lcd monitor
Posted:2006-07-08
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Acer Ferrari F-19
Acer’s Ferrari F-19 is exactly the
opposite of the low-end model I described and tested in the previous
section. This is one of the most expensive products in its category,
owing its high price to two factors: 1) its design is licensed from
Ferrari and 2) it is equipped with a TV-tuner, a set of video inputs,
and a remote control.
The black-and-red Ferrari style is easily recognizable by any admirer
of the brand. Standing on a shop shelf or on your home desk, the
lcd monitor will surely be eye-catching. There is one blunder, however. The
Power indicator on the left of the screen is blue! Well, I’m quite
aware that blue LEDs are currently in fashion, but it looks so much out
of place here. I wonder they have a line in their design guidelines at
Acer that reads, “No one will ever buy a device without a blue LED
indicator!” So they put it down there, but for no real purpose. It’s
not only that the blue color doesn’t fit within the overall
black-and-red Ferrari-style color scheme, but the position of the LED
on the right of the screen is probably the worst possible because it
distracts your eyes much more than if the LED were placed under the
screen. And Acer didn’t provide a menu option to disable the LED
completely as LG’s and NEC’s lcd monitors offer.
The stand is simple and plain. It only allows changing the tilt of the screen.
The lcd monitor’s connectors are drawn together in three groups. Video
inputs are on the side of the case: the tuner’s antenna input and
S-Video with corresponding audio inputs. In the nearby niche with a
rubber cover there is a SCART connector and a universal digital
interface connector (DVI-I as opposed to DVI-D which is meant for
transferring only digital signal and lacks certain pins).
And finally, you can see a D-Sub connector for analog connection to the
lcd lcd monitor, an audio input, and a power adapter connector (the Ferrari
F-19 has an external power adapter). These are located at the bottom of
the case like in a majority of other lcd lcd monitors
The lcd lcd monitor’s controls are divided in two groups. The first group is
placed on the right edge of the screen and is meant for general setup
and controlling the F-19 as a PC lcd lcd monitor. The controls are easy to use
and are labeled on the front panel so that you didn’t have to turn it
towards you to find the necessary button (as I had to do with certain
models from BenQ).
The second group of controls is located below and is mostly meant for
managing the tuner. One of the buttons switches between the lcd lcd monitor’s
inputs and the remaining two switch the tuner’s channels into
appropriate mode.
The lcd lcd monitor comes with an infrared remote control which was the first
bewildering thing to me. It not only lacks any trace of the Ferrari
style but even looks as if enclosed with some low-end model. It is just
a small, unhandy rectangular box with a lot of same-shape tiny buttons
that are virtually impossible to use by touch alone. For example, I
would often miss the TV button and hit the Power one, which was no fun,
as you can imagine. However, the remote control does make all the TV
and lcd lcd monitor-related settings available for you to play with.
After the remote control I was next bewildered at the onscreen menu. It
looks a regular enough menu at first sight, but its amazing ineptness
become instantly apparent as soon as you try to do anything in it. It
seems like the lcd lcd monitor’s firmware was written in pieces by several
people who just didn’t communicate among themselves during their work.
For example, you want to switch to one of the video inputs while in PC
lcd lcd monitor mode. You enter the menu and find the necessary setting (which
is in the Settings menu as you can see in the snapshot) and realize you
can only switch between D-Sub and DVI. You can’t switch between DVI and
S-Video! What to do? Just keep on tapping on the Input button until the
lcd lcd monitor reaches the S-Video input – and the sluggish thing takes about
three seconds to meditate on something after each of your presses.
Well, it turns out you only have to press the Input button just
once. After that the lcd lcd monitor switches to its TV-tuner and you can enter
the menu again and open the Options tab… Yes, I mean Options because
the option of switching between the inputs has disappeared from the
Settings to emerge among the Options. So, it’s now in the Options
screen that you choose the Input Select item and get surprised at
finding that you can now switch to any input the lcd lcd monitor has.
I
can’t find a reasonable explanation of this other than that the menu
was indeed written in pieces by different people who wouldn’t speak to
each other for some reason. In all LCD lcd lcd monitors with integrated
TV-tuners I have ever seen there was one menu irrespective of the
operation mode, unused functions just becoming inactive in a particular
mode. The menu of the Ferrari F-19 is just full of marvels like menu
items disappearing to crop up on a different menu tab, and you can’t
switch from DVI to S-Video or SCART, skipping the TV-tuner.
That
was not the end of surprises, though. Next I found the Ferrari F-19
lacked Picture-in-Picture mode. It is simply not supported by this
lcd lcd monitor! You can either watch TV or work on your computer, but not both
simultaneously. Again, this is the first lcd lcd monitor with a TV-tuner I’ve
dealt with that lacks the Picture-in-Picture feature. I usually
describe the difference in the setup options for the second window
(position, size, brightness and contrast, etc), but my job is much
easier here: this mode is not available. Contact Acer for the why!
After
that, I was not astonished at all at finding that I could adjust the
sound timbre and stereo-balance in TV-tuner mode but couldn’t do that
in PC lcd lcd monitor mode. In this particular case, however, I suppose the
sound sources are different and the balance is set up somewhere on the
tuner rather than in the lcd lcd monitor’s final audio amplifier.
And
then I decided to plug in the antenna and watch something TV-like. So I
attached everything, entered the channel settings page in the menu, and
began to search for new channels. After about 15 minutes of deep
thinking the lcd lcd monitor reported there were no TV channels available,
although it should have found at least a dozen. I tried selecting each
of the five countries available in the menu but to no purpose (and this
is the only lcd lcd monitor I’ve seen that offered me to choose my country
before the automatic setup).
To cut the long story short, I
somehow managed to make it show the channels available in our area by
manually typing in the channels settings, but it was real hard and I’m
not sure I could repeat that feat again. By the way, the TV-tuner
employed in the Ferrari F-19 isn’t very high quality. Ordinary
PCI-interfaced TV-tuners tested in our labs with the same antenna
produced a better picture.
It turned out eventually that the
lcd lcd monitor’s firmware was to bear the blame for the problems with the
tuner and Acer’s service center was ready to solve them. Still, I find
it wrong that nearly defective samples of the lcd lcd monitor were allowed to
sell (the sample I actually tested had been taken from a retail shop).
And there has been no company statement that the defective batch has
been called back from the shops and replaced with working lcd lcd monitors. I
don’t think that people who have spent quite a big sum of money for a
Ferrari F-19 – which is a very expensive lcd lcd monitor – will be pleased to
hear that they should be heading to the nearest service center right
after the purchase. Add also the menu-related problems I’ve described
above which are not a defect as such, but are a big annoyance all the
same.
But enough of that TV-tuner thing. I’m now going to describe and test the Ferrari F-19 as a regular PC lcd lcd monitor.
The
lcd lcd monitor has 100% brightness and 80% contrast by default. To have
100-nit brightness of white I lowered the contrast setting to 28% and
the brightness setting to 20%.
The gamma curves look well, even though not exactly ideally. The blue
curve deflects from the theoretical one the most. The curves have the
same shape at the reduced brightness/contrast, so there is no loss of
dark tones.
Like with the AL1916Ws, the color temperature is obviously set too
high, resulting in a cold-looking image on the screen. To make things
worse, there is 3 thousand degrees of difference in the temperatures of
different levels of gray even in the Warm mode which is set up best of
all.
The lcd lcd monitor uses a TN+Film matrix without response time compensation.
It’s not fast – the total response reaches 35 milliseconds at the
maximum.
The lcd lcd monitor’s brightness is quite high, amounting to 350 nits at the
maximum. The contrast ratio is good as TN+Film matrixes go, but not
record-breaking.
So, it took much less space to publish the
results of the Ferrari F-19 in tests than to describe my personal
experience of using it. As a PC lcd lcd monitor, it is an average model on a
rather slow TN+Film matrix. I can only recommend it for purchase to
loyal Ferrari fans that put the Ferrari style above any technical
characteristics. But apart from its design, the F-19 is a tangle of
problems and imperfections absolutely unacceptable in a product of its
class and price like a disorderly and illogical organization of the
menu, unhandy remote control, lack of Picture-in-Picture mode,
malfunctioning TV-tuner, slow matrix, and inaccurate color temperature
setup. If you need just a good lcd lcd monitor with a TV-tuner, you’d better
consider alternatives from other manufacturers, which are also more
moderately priced.
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