Acer SB220Q Review: Best Affordable Gaming Monitor?

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Acer SB220Q Review
 Acer SB220Q
Acer SB220Q Review: Acer SB220Q 21.5 inches

Typically, at a $100 price point, you’d have to be ready to make a couple of compromises if you’re looking for good and high-quality gaming monitors.

In particular, you’d have to be flexible in how you define “good” and “high-quality.” However, a product is released that comes with everything you need at an attractive price point.

The ACER SB220Q is an excellent example of one such product.

The Acer SB220Q comes with everything that you would need in a work or gaming monitor. Read on, and you’ll find why the Acer SB220 is worth buying.

Brief Overview

  • AMD Radeon FreeSync Technology
  • Ultra-thin and slim design
  • Adjustable angle

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Screen size 21.5 inches
Resolution 1920×1080 Full HD
Panel type IPS
Aspect ratio 16:8 (Widescreen)
Refresh rate 75Hz
Response time 4ms (GtG)
Adaptive Sync FreeSync (48Hz-75Hz)
Ports HDMI 1.4, VGA
Colors 16.7 million (6-bit + FRC)

For starters, the Acer SB220Q comes with a vibrant IPS-LED panel, FULL HD 1080p resolution, and AMD FreeSync.It has a refresh rate of up to 75Hz and a 4ms response time for smoother gaming performance.

Rounding out the already-excellent package that the Acer SB220Q is its slim design and ultra-thin bezels make the monitor look like it belongs in a professional office setting.

Priced at just below $100, the Acer SB220Q is unbeatable at its price point.

What Makes The SB220Q Worthy?

 Acer SB220Q

Aim Point

This feature is found in a lot of gaming monitors these days.

What Aim Point does is it puts three crosshair overlays to help improve aim precision. This feature should come in handy, especially in First Person Shooter titles.

If you remember putting a sticker dot on your TV screen back in the day to help you find out the “center” of your screen, the Aim Point feature is similar to that. Instead, everything is done automatically for you, so you don’t have to worry about sticking dots or anything similar.

Black Boost

IPS-LED screens boast incredible color accuracy and reproduction. Unfortunately, they’re not perfect.

One of their most significant weaknesses is insufficient brightness in darker parts of video games. This feature helps mitigate that problem and makes it so that darker parts of your favorite games don’t come across as washed or ugly.

OverDrive

The OverDrive feature lets you adjust your monitor’s response time to minimize trailing and ghosting.

This feature comes in extremely handy in First Person Shooter games and other titles where there are fast-moving objects.

With the Acer SB220Q, you can adjust the OverDrive to three settings: Off, Normal, and Extreme.

However, keep in mind that if you enable FreeSync, you won’t use the Extreme setting on OverDrive.

Pre-Calibrated Picture Presets

 Acer SB220Q

Different titles benefit from different calibration settings, but who was time to adjust their monitor based on individual titles, right?

With the Acer SB220Q, you have three pre-calibrated picture presets to choose from. Namely, these are Action, Racing, and Sports. You can also add your customized gaming profile if you feel like you can do a better job than the presets.

Flicker-Free and Low Blue Light Filter

These two features make it so that the Acer SB220Q gaming monitor won’t give you eye fatigue and headaches after looking at your screen for hours on end.

AMD FreeSync

With a 75Hz refresh rate and 4ms response time, as well as AMD FreeSync, your games will come out running smooth and with minimal input lag.

Ultra-Thin Zero Frame Design

 Acer SB220Q

The Acer SB220Q comes with a 0.24-inch thin, ZeroFrame bezel-less design that’s all housed inside a half an inch thick black cabinet.

This combination of sleek and stylish aesthetics helps make the Acer SB220Q stand out compared to its competition. Also, because of its thin bezels and relatively affordable price, setting up a multi-monitor display with the Acer SB220Q won’t set you back as much.

Is the Acer SB220Q Worth Buying?

A 21.5-inch gaming monitor with an IPS-LED screen is not groundbreaking by any means.

Even if you throw in AMD FreeSync there, you’ll find plenty of other gaming monitors offering the same thing, if not better at the same size. The Acer SB220Q gaming monitor excels above the competition in how everything is packaged under the $100 price point.

It has an IPS-LED screen, AMD FreeSync with a 75Hz refresh rate and a 4ms response time, as well as a vast slew of features that make it great for both gaming and casual use.

Whether it’s for gaming and general productivity, you’d have a hard time finding anything that’s priced, as well as the Acer SB220Q with the same feature set that it has.

The only reason why you won’t need the Acer SB220Q is if you need something with better color accuracy because that’s not its strong suit.

Even though the IPS-LED panel gives it better color reproduction and accuracy than TN and VA panels, the Acer SB220Q suffers from middling color and grayscale performance.

You’ll also have to make enough space for additional speakers because the built-in speakers of the Acer SB220Q are below average, at best.

Final Thoughts

Sure, the Acer SB220Q is not perfect.

The overall picture and image quality is barely above average.

Yes, it’s still great because it has an IPS-LED screen, but it’s not ideal if your job requires better color reproduction and accuracy.

Not to mention, the arm doesn’t support height, swivel, or pivot adjustment.

The best that you can do with it is a -5 to a 15-degree tilt, which isn’t much when you think about it.

The lack of a USB port and VESA mounting also means that you’re limited to the amount of desk space you have with the Acer SB220Q.

This can be a massive problem if you plan on running a multi-monitor set-up using the Acer SB220Q. Ultimately, the Acer SB220Q offers more than what it doesn’t.

The Acer SB220Q is the ideal choice if you want a bigger screen to hook up your smartphone or console too, or you want to add another monitor to your work desk.

It’s also a perfect starter gaming monitor for gamers who have just built their first gaming set-up.

All things considered, the Acer SB220Q is an excellent value proposition that both gamers and casual users alike will appreciate.
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