Tech Blog

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Touch screen computing offers a cool and intuitive new way of interacting with your PC. Being able to reach out and touch your photos, flip through your music, even control games with the touch of a finger is incredibly cool. How do you go about adding touch technology to your new PC without replacing it with a touch-based all-in-one? Simple: The Acer T230H.

Heavy Duty.

Acer did a smart thing when they included a hefty base with the T230H. Not only is it great for tilting the display and mounting it at the right height, it adds enough weight to the display to keep it stable. Pulling everything out of the box for the first time you'll notice that there are a multitude of cables. I connected it to my PC with my existing DVI cable, but don't forget that you have the option of connecting it up with VGA or HDMI, giving you plenty of options.

Plugging it in is important.

DO NOT FORGET THE USB CABLE. Seriously. It seems so common sense, but I totally forgot to connect it up (despite no fewer than three posters/pages reminding me... sigh). As soon as i did, the touch features sprang to life in my version of Windows 7 Ultimate. You'll see a reference to the control panel for additional options, but unless you need to do some fine tuning you'll find that the T230H works perfectly out of the box.

So, how does it look?

Well, on the outside it's a sleek looking monitor. The base is Y-shaped and heavy (as mentioned earlier) and does a great job of resisting the pressure you put on the screen. The bezel is angular and clean, with a large illuminated power button in addition to other front/bottom mounted controls. The screen itself features a glossy finish that's popular with modern monitors, driving better contrast and additional colour pop. You might find that there is some glare in direct light, but it's not too distracting.

The resolution is high at Full HD 1920 x 1080. At 2ms the response time was fast and I've seen no ghosting at all. Colours are crisp and accurate: over 16.7 million colours are available, and the 80,000:1 contrast ratio gives you great results in both bright and dark areas of scenes. Black levels are deep and not muddy. Colours are good, but not amazing; with only 72% of the NTSC colour spectrum covered I have seen more accurate monitors, but nothing with this kind of functionality built it. It's not a bad trade off to make.

Should you want to VESA mount the panel, you can. The bolt pattern is 100x100, which is convenient for most monitor arms and mounts. When running it consumes roughly 35.5W with ENERGY STAR® mode turned on, so it's quite good at reducing your power bills over older LCDs.

Touch much?

Touch is cool. It may seem gimmicky when at arm's length (ha!) but when you get down to it, you'll find yourself quickly adapting to the idea that yes, you can reach out and touch your data. It took less than an hour for me to unconsciously not reach for the mouse but to start doing things with my screen instead. Simply tasks like hitting "OK" or dragging and dropping are instantly more intuitive.

I asked some computer-phobic friends to come over and give it a shot. Without telling them how to operate the screen, I told them it was a touch screen and gave them a list of tasks to try. Each one was able to copy files, browse music, and even rotate and edit pictures all without instructions. I was impressed.

Touch computing is just getting started, but already Windows® 7 is ready for it; the operating system responds as if it were built from the ground up with touch in mind. Acer has really delivered a great piece of hardware in the T230H, unlocking powerful features in Windows® 7 that you might not even know are there. This is technology that just works.

So who's it for?

Well, I managed to use it for games, for media, and for Internet browsing and social networking. If you're looking for a new monitor or a way to add touch features to your existing system, I can recommend the T230H without reservation. It's a cool piece of technology that adds awesome new functionality to your PC that make it more accessible to everyone (even those who don't like computers) and make it more fun at the same time.