Alienware is a controversial brand. They often deliver high performing products, but there's also an accompanying high price tag. One of the ways they try to stand out is through unique styling, and recently the company went through a complete redesign. The new identity is aggressive and futuristic, and the Alienware OptX AW2210 display fits it to a 't'. Read on for our full review.
Specifications:
- Display: 21.5 inches
- Resolution: 1920x1080
- Panel technology: TN
- Brightness: 300 cd/m^2
- Response time: 2ms (GTG)
- Viewing angles: 170 degrees / 160 degrees (H/V)
- Gamut: 85% NTSC
- Ratio: 80001:1 (dynamic)
- Inputs: DVI, 2x HDMI, 4x USB2.0, analog audio in and out
The Alienware AW2210 is available with a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $299.
Build and Design
It's worth noting that there have been some rumblings on the internet regarding the price of the AW2210 and some of Dell's other monitors - namely, the ST2210. People have been saying that the OptX is just a rebadged ST2210 with an extra hundred dollars tacked on to the asking price. This isn't really fair - I'm not saying the $300 price tag is entirely justified, but the OptX AW2210 does bring a number of features to the table that the other monitor does not. It has a refresh rate that's two and a half times quicker, it offers a number of menu settings, surprisingly responsive capacitive touch buttons and a nice stand and design. Moreover, since it falls under the OptX brand, it qualifies for Dell's "Premium Panel Guarantee" - even a single bright pixel warrants an exchange while under warranty.
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Alienware's designs tend to be a love-it-or-hate-it sort of deal - until recently, that meant a curving, futuristic art deco sort of style - glossy, a bit retro. Their new style, however, tosses all of that out the window. In fact, the only similarities between the two designs is their famous alien head logo. The new products are aggressive and masculine, and add a very-high tech feel to each of their lines. While the company recently launched a couple of new desktops, the OptX AW2210 display is the first big product to feature the new style.
Looking at the stand, it's very well constructed. The unit is built from both metal and plastics, with the almost trapezoidal shield at the bottom featuring glossy plastic, and the stand at the back mixing in some matte black metal. The combination of glossy and matte looks nice, and it feels very solid. The circle in the bottom is where the whole monitor can swivel to the left and right - the monitor itself doesn't swivel; the stand does. In the rear, the stand has a column that snaps into place in the rear of the display and lets users raise and lower the monitor's height. The tension in the column is pretty strong, giving a secure feel to the raising and lowering action.
In profile, it feels a little organic, like the monitor was partially grown and not cast. With the articulating hinge at the top and the indentations on the back of the stand, it really does feel like a sci-fi alien prop. The new design does more to convey the Alienware brand than their old monitors ever did, which were a little boring at the best of times. It also matches the new keyboard and desktops very well, if you want every to mesh together on your desk.
There are no physical buttons on the display - instead, Alienware/Dell has replaced them with a series of six capacitive touch sensors. Normally, here's where I'd start complaining about how much better physical buttons are, with the response, quality, lack of lag, ease of use, etc. I can't, though, because these work very well. The monitor turns on with a brief touch on the power symbol, and the sensors flash up and down once when it's powered up. As you reach toward the button area to modify the display's settings, the bottom one senses the movement and lights up before you reach it, letting you know where it is. After that, the OSD takes over, but I did want to stress how quick and responsive the capacitive touch sensors are - we've had monitors in for review where this style of button becomes a weakness, but with the AW2210, it becomes a strength.
In terms of inputs, the new Alienware display probably has you covered, but take care - this thing is all digital. You won't be able to hook up something with a VGA cable, since the DVI port present is DVI-D, not the DVI-I that incorporates both VGA and DVI inputs. Having said that, there is one DVI port present, and two HDMI ports. The monitor is capable of intelligently switching between the input that is probably active, but if you keep active signals on multiple ports simultaneously - such as a computer and a cable box - you can pick and choose in the menus. There are also four USB2.0 ports that require a regular USB cable to attach the monitor to the computer, and line-in and line-out audio jacks - useful for moving audio streams around and avoiding having to connect speakers all the way down to your computer.
Display Quality
The first thing that has to be said about the monitor's actual picture quality is that it uses a TN panel. Granted, TN panels have come a long way since their inception, but they still largely can't hold a candle to competing technologies like VA and IPS when it comes to color reproduction and viewing angles. The AW2210 showcases this fact - its viewing angles are acceptable, but not outstanding; while users probably won't have any issues, if you need expansive viewing angles, especially vertically, chances are that this is not the monitor for you. It does have other redeeming features, however, like a very bright display and very fast (2ms) refresh rate, which is typically far more important for a gamer playing a fast-paced FPS than the display's color fidelity.
The backlighting isn't uniform across the display, but it's not something you'll notice when the monitor is filled with a bright and/or colorful picture. The issue comes instead when you try to display a black image on the screen. Then you can see some bleeding across the top. Our monitor also had a dark spot right below the top edge that took up about a third of the screen, then more light filtering through on the rest of the display. While it's very unlikely that users will keep the backlight at maximum most of the time - it is very bright, after all - if you do, the black levels suffer enough that even with a blank (i.e., black) picture, you'll have enough light being broadcast to read by.
In the pictures above, the backlight is set at one hundred percent, fifty percent and all the way down to zero, respectively. Even at zero, there was a noticeable amount of backlight bleeding, although it's hard to see in the photos. All of the lighting was a little worse than these pictures show. Again, though, this is something that absolutely isn't noticeable when the screen is filled with a desktop picture or other bright colors - even while watching movies or playing a game, I didn't notice any sort of problems. So while it's worth pointing out as a criticism, it isn't worth spending too much time fretting about.
Horizontal viewing angles were easily acceptable; despite being a TN panel, it's probably not something you'll need to worry about. Especially a display of this size - since the AW2210 is "only" 21.5 inches instead of 24 or more, you won't see the color distortions that plague big displays as much.
Vertical viewing angles didn't fare quite as well, however, and that was a little disappointing. Granted, chances are extremely slim that you'll be needing excessively wide viewing angles, but there have been times where I've wanted to work or use the computer standing up, which means that you'd be looking at the display from a tighter angle. Fortunately, the stand does allow for tilting the monitor back and forth, which will alleviate just about any of the distortion you'd experience in common use.
It's important to note, though, that this is a gaming-centric monitor. That means that it's designed to have high refresh rates, low tearing, and an imperceptible input lag - all things that this display possesses. Items like wide viewing angles and high color reproduction become way less important when you're trying to nail that head shot without getting taken out from the back.
OSD and Navigation
The AW2210's capacitive touch menuing system was briefly mentioned earlier, but it's worth a revisit here. Like most modern displays, whether using capacitive or physical buttons, the menu system on this monitor is dynamic. That is, the function of the buttons changes depending on what menu you're in at any specific time. The on-screen display, or OSD, puts a little label at the edge of the screen next to each button, so you don't have to worry about peering in and looking for what each button does - you can press it and go. One annoying feature about the menu setup, however, is the audible beep that is emitted every time you activate one of the touch sensors. It's not terribly loud, just enough to give you feeback, but it's frustrating that there's no setting to turn it off. I'd hate to have to adjust the monitor when gaming late at night and risk waking someone up (again, it's not very loud, but that's beside the point). Alienware seemed a little surprised that in fact there wasn't such a setting during our product briefing, so I hope it's an option they'll add to future revisions.
The menus are easy to read in both bright and dark environments, with a fairly logical layout. By default, the menu appears as above, with each button given a specific task, like brightness, input switching, video modes, etc, that appear after the menu button is first pressed. You can change this, however, to a more advanced menu box that offers all of these functions, plus a few more, and relies on the touch sensor for navigation more than any predefined function.
The advanced menu offers several more settings than the basic menu that pops up by default. By exploring these options, you can change settings like the sharpness, aspect ratio, whether you want to overdrive the panel, etc. There are also the lesser used settings, such as setting the menu language, menu transparency and locks.
If you'll notice, there are five buttons lit up along the side of the monitor. The bottom one turns the monitor on and off, and the one just above it activates the OSD and serves as the menu button. That leaves three more sitting above with no predefined function. The AW2210 lets you program these as shortcut keys so that you can activate some part of the OSD without diving into the menus. You can set up one to switch input sources for you, another to change the brightness or contrast, and a third to swap between preset video modes.
Speaking of video modes, like every display that's come out recently, Alienware added a numbe of presets to the OptX AW2210 that you can switch between depending on what you're doing in a given activity. There are six different preset options as well as a custom setting that lets you play with the raw RGB settings yourself; the latter is typically only seen on higher-end monitors, so it's a nice addition. Standard, Multimedia, Game, Warm and Cool all change the display in different ways, whether it means turning off video processing or making the display extra bright, or dimming it in order to watch a video.
While I suppose they're nice features to have, I can't recall ever using these modes on any monitor. It's a pain to have to fiddle with monitor buttons when you just want to play a game or watch a movie, or browse the web. It's probably worth going to the trouble of doing some calibrations with your display - when you do that, set the RGB values to something appropriate to how you use it, and let it be. It isn't worth worrying about, really.
Power and Heat
We've had issues in the past with displays that get a little too hot for their own good. Fortunately, the AW2210 does a decent job of keeping things cool. Even at the maximum brightness setting, temperatures never got higher than 104 degrees around the edges, and the display itself stayed typically in the mid-90s. Things got a little cooler, obviously, when the backlighting was dialed back. Similarly, the power draw was typical for a display of this size; with the backlighting system turned all the way down to zero, the monitor drew an average of 20 watts of electricity. Turning the light up to 50 brought the power draw up to 30 watts, and setting it at 100 took us up to 45 watts. Probably not noticeable when sitting next to a high-powered gaming system, but it's enough that you should set your operating system's power settings to put the display in sleep mode when it isn't being used.
Conclusion
Overall, the Alienware AW2210 is a nice monitor. The stand is stylish and futuristic, giving a much-needed update to Alienware's branding and identity. It's also very well built; this is not a lightweight monitor built with a bunch of cheap plastics. Thankfully, too - it carries with it a $300 price tag, and that's getting very high for a TN-based monitor with a 21.5-inch panel. Still; there are a number of things it has going for it, like that stand, nice OSD with touch sensors, fast refresh rate, and a really nice pixel guarantee. Moreover, if you're an Alienware fan with one of the new desktops, chances are you'll want something to match the systems, and in that case the AW2210 would serve admirably. In the end, it may not be the right monitor for everyone, but given its unique identity and support features, it would be a worthy purchase next to your gaming system.
Pros
- Great build quality
- Nice stand
- Dynamic touch sensors
- Pixel guarantee
Cons
- Pricey
- Poor vertical viewing angles
- No pivot
Alienware OptX AW2210 LCD Review
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