The old Viewsonic monitor here at Nordic PC has been giving me trouble for the past few months, and I've been looking for a while to get something to replace it. That finally happened today, with the arrival of my new Acer x233h. Over at Newegg, this 23" full 1080p monitor costs less than $200, which is just plain silly for this much real estate. This isn't a full review, just a quick preview about what I noticed right out of the box.

I hooked it up to the 7600GS in my main work box over the DVI port, and it displayed the 1600x1200 resolution from my old monitor just fine. I always hate it when a screen can't handle fairly standard resolutions, even if it has to stretch them a bit. I opened up the NVIDIA control panel and shifted it to 1920x1080, and it synced up very nicely.

The main thing that will blow you away about this screen is that it is significantly wider than the old 16x10 widescreen LCD's. This is a move in the industry to standardize a little more between PC's and televisions. The 16x9 format means that you will run 1920x1080 instead of 1920x1200, which is a loss of roughly .23 megapixels, but I am starting to think that the wider screen will actually help me with my desktop layout. Since you can't really focus on more than the middle 75% of the screen, I'm using Sidebar and the little Notes gadget a lot more.

The screens's brightness and contrast levels are about what you would expect for a modern LCD: almost too high. I'll be playing with that more in the near future, but for now, right out of the box, the settings should suit most anyone.

So the skinny on the x233h: buy it. It's a huge, cheap LCD, and it looks great.