14 DAY TRIAL // As often as Acer crops up in the news, the company is, oddly enough, one of the IT players that hasn't yet made a contribution to the 4K / UHD display market. This is set to change soon, however, with the CB280HK monitor.
We are almost tempted to call it odd that Acer isn't starting out the same way mostly everyone did, with television sets instead of a monitor. However, Acer happens to be less active in that field than others.
That said, the new monitor has a diagonal of 28 inches, which puts it squarely in the same competition grounds as the ones that NEC and ViewSonic have unveiled recently.
However, the one from Acer is a bit unusual in that it uses a TN (twisted nematic) panel instead of an IPS one (in-plane switching).
It goes to show how much the world has changed. Once upon a time, TN panels were the normal ones and IPS ones just didn't show up except once in ten or so new monitors/TVs.
IPS technology slowly got over its disadvantages though (poorer brightness and image quality) while maintaining its trump card (wide viewing angles) so it started to supplant TN as the primary method of designing a display panel.
In this case, however, Acer wanted TN because this technology still has one area where it wins by a large margin, an area quite important to high-speed games: response time.
IPS screens are lucky if they reach the display “average” of 5 ms, but can come in 6 ms or even 8 ms or more, usually when the monitor is intended for professional graphics design or the like.
TN, however, can go all the way to 1 ms. Acer's new CB280HK doesn't, but it gets close, at 2 ms, meaning that even the most frantic shooting matches and sword fights will reach your eyes without any lag between the PC and the screen.
Other specifications exhibited by the new Acer monitors are a contrast ratio of 1,000:1 (pretty normal), LED backlighting and, of course, the native resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels (Ultra High Definition).
Finally, the Acer CB280HK should be able to connect to any desktop, to act as a secondary laptop display, thanks to having DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort and even mini DisplayPort. That last one is important because it means you can align and sync six of them on high-end AMD cards that boast multiple mDPs, as dictated by Eyefinity technology.
Acer's 28-inch CB280HK monitor should be up for pre-order at €499 / $675.