Review of the Acer X191W monitor

I recently purchased an Acer X191W monitor, a flat-screen 19 inch monitor. While I have no complaints about the screen itself -- it's a very good picture -- the design of the stand is horrible. There is absolutely no flexibility at all in positioning the angle of the monitor. To get around this problem I currently have it resting on top of two books, with a deck of cards under the front portion of the monitor stand so it will tilt back to an angle that works well for me. I've never had a monitor that was this inflexible.

As I mentioned the screen itself seems fine, I have no complaints there at all. But the stand is so bad I can't recommend purchasing this monitor. Mixing a decent-quality screen with the Yugo of monitor stands just doesn't make sense.

While I'm at it, my other pet peeve with all monitors are the controls for brightness and contrast. I can understand the other rarely-used features (that I don't use) should be in a digital menu-based format, but as a note to all monitor designers, when you work in an office with natural light, you may have to change the brightness and contrast a lot. Because of this I think plain old analog controls (think scroll wheels on the side or bottom of the monitor) for brightness and contrast are 1,000 times more human-friendly than crazy menu systems laid on top of meaningless buttons on the bottom of the monitor.