The menu is Acer’s traditional except that its first screen offers to choose between factory-set and user-defined settings rather than provides access to the brightness and contrast settings. The purpose of this selection eludes me because if you want to use the factory-set modes, you don’t have to enter the main menu at all – you can just press the e button on the front panel instead. Then, if you choose User, you still don’t access the brightness/contrast settings, but find yourself in the menu title again which now looks like follows:
The next time you evoke the menu, you have to choose between the factory-set and user-defined settings again. I don’t quite understand why you are thrown back into the menu title when you select the user-defined mode. As a result, you have to press the monitor’s buttons seven times to access the brightness setting!
The factory-set modes are accessible by pressing the e button. As opposed to many other monitors in which you browse through the modes with the same dedicated button, you have to use the “<” and “>” buttons here.
The monitor has 77% brightness and 50% contrast by default. I reduced them both to 30% to achieve a 100nit brightness of white. You shouldn’t raise the contrast value above 50% as it makes light halftones merge into white. The brightness is regulated by means of backlight modulation at a frequency of 271Hz.
The average brightness uniformity on white is 5.3% with a maximum deflection of 17.3%. For black, the corresponding average and maximum are 11.9% and 36.0%. The brightness patterns differ: on white, there are darker areas along the sides of the screen. On black, there are brighter areas along the top and bottom of the screen. Generally speaking, many monitors have this kind of brightness uniformity, but it usually looks like narrow bands and has little effect on the results of our measurements. The P223W has rather wide bands.
The monitor’s color gamut is standard for a monitor that uses backlight lamps with ordinary phosphors. It is somewhat larger than the sRGB color space in greens and smaller than it in reds.
