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Two observations that some prospective buyers could find detractive:

(1) A previous review was correct about the stand being slightly off vertical when the stand was put in the fully extended position; lowering from the fully extended position by an inch or so resolved the problem.

(2) If you have Bose speakers with the special four-wire plug the size of a small matchbox (such as the CineMate home theater system has), you will not be able to thread the speaker wire up through the stand; but for any conventional audio jack these stands should allow threading with no problem. (Inner diameter of stand’s upper tube is approx. 1/2″).

Update: Stands have been in service for over a year now and I remain completely satisfied with their quality and value.

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Easy to setup…sorta. attaching my speakers on the stands was a bit tricky, but I just tightened the screws a bit more and I feel overall, the stands are very sturdy, provided I don’t fully extend them (which I won’t, as they are nice and tall fully extended). When you extend them fully, there is a bit of wobble.

The stands Klipsh recommends for these speakers are about $80-90 per pair – heaven forbid you get 2 pair! For the price, these stands are simply wonderful…I had to remind myself they were so inexpensive.

Notice I don’t say “cheap” as I don’t want to have the word mean the stands are cheap in build as well as price. The build is really great for the price. If you look at the stand bottom, you may find some signs of a poor mold – or whatever they use to make the bottoms – but that’s on the underside of the stand – I felt the bottoms themselves were very well designed and I did a “nudge test” to see if the stands would topple. I felt that they withstood the test well. If you cross-check them, yes they will fall, but if they are in a low-traffic area, you’re good to go.

If you need stands, get these and save some dough. Please don’t drill holes in your speakers as the instructions suggest…speaker abuse, in my opinion.

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Speaker wire can be completely hidden. The wire feeds through the stand and comes out the top for connection to your speakers. There is a cool little “U” shape on the front foot where the speaker wire comes out on the bottom. It keeps the speaker wire directed where you want it to be directed on the base. It’s a very well thought out design feature that I’ve not seen on other stands. With tile floors, it makes a big difference for me. It keeps the speaker wire directed under the sofa where I want it so it can’t be seen.

Now on to stability-

If you have hard flooring, you will be able to extend the stands all the way up if you screw the speakers to the bottom plate. The base is surprisingly stable and it has rubbery stuff on the bottom to keep it from sliding. If the stands will be on carpet, you may not be able to fully extend them unless you have small speakers. My son’s system has small speakers. They are back mounted to the stand with a screw and nut that fit inside a metal bracket that can be removed for screw mount. His speakers are on berber carpet. With his small lightweight speakers he is able to fully extend these with no wobble.

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Here’s all the things wrong that I noticed:

-Backlight bleed through the top and the bottom of the screen. Only noticeable when the screen is black or very dark. I really doubt this will bother anyone during normal use.

-The stand is kind of flimsy and not height adjustable. Easily solved by putting it on top of something. It’s low enough that you would only ever have to raise it.

-Colors shift when you look at it from the left or right side.

-Gets darker and lighter when you look at it from above or below (polarizing? I think that’s what it’s called). It’s like the display on a laptop. The viewing angle isn’t the best, but it’s not the worst either. When I was looking at all the displays in Best Buy, it was one of the better ones. As long as you don’t need super accurate color, it shouldn’t bother you. And the only way to get a monitor that doesn’t do this is to splurge on a higher quality one that doesn’t use the cheap tn film technology. That will cost twice as much.

-The touch buttons suck. Whatever.

-The colors are off a little bit. Very noticeable when you look at color bars and test patterns and whatnot, during everyday use, not so much. Just factory settings were fine for what I was using it for. If you’re anal about it, you can adjust it yourself. I didn’t notice anything, but when I need accurate colors, my iMac display is really good. I wouldn’t use this.

-On the positive side. No dead pixels out of the box.

-No ghosting or screen lag at all, even with something super fast paced like Street Fighter 4.

In the end, it comes down to what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for a main display to do photoshop work on, this isn’t it. If you’re looking for a second display, or you just don’t want that hdmi plug on the back of your xbox to go to waste, this is perfect. I took it out of the box, plugged in my xbox, and enjoyed some 1080p Street Fighter all night for $200. My suggestion: don’t but a monitor without looking at it first. You could spend hours reading reviews online, or line them up at an electronics store and decide in 20 seconds.

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But upon getting this new monitor it is like Paul on the road to Damascus – clearly I was blind before.

Now I can see the intricate details that are required to adequately fight off the hordes of the undead. Little bits of graffiti from survivors are now crisp and clear, easily read by flashlight.

And thanks to a KVM switch I can go back and forth between fighting zombies and earning the $money needed to keep up the up-link between my office and the remote-zombie-killing avatar.

Thanks Acer – I know you want me to save the world and now I’m doing it in style at a price I can afford.

I can’t help but notice that in the zombie filled city, it’s viewsonic monitors being trashed by the dead, while I watch in style with 40,000:1 contrast with my Acer.

No dead pixels, easy to setup, works with KVM, rocks harder, is shiny, has HDMI + VGA inputs, and is big and black and powerful like some ancient warrior rising from the Kingdom of Ghana to fight an anachronistic T-Rex plaguing the local villagers!

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And I’m not disappointed, it worked like a charm out of box (but that’s expected I guess). What wasn’t was, the inbuilt speaker and the touch sensitive buttons. Agreed both are not big selling points but was nevertheless nice touches.

The pictures look good and crisp and it has the highest resolution in that range (1920 x 1080 / 75 Hz)

And it has loads of inputs (DVI,HDMI and normal VGA) plus it come with all the cables (Very impressed)

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It plugged right in to my MacBook and worked without a hitch. I didn’t bother with the enclosed CD. All necessary cables were supplied in the box.

Would I buy it again? Yes.

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So if you are buying this screen for editing images (and I mean at least PhotoShop or Gimp here) or any other application that requires correct color representation you should consider more expensive 8 bit screen.

With exception of this detail the monitor is real value for money.

It should be mentioned that HDMI input and built-in speakers open couple of interesting capabilities for this product.

For example, using (included!) HDMI cable you can easily use it as a monitor for X-Box, PS-3 (but not for Wii) or DVD player with HDMI output. Or you can connect it to your cable provider hi-def box therefore instantly converting monitor to small HDTV. The only problem is quality of integrated speakers – see below.

Well, I am still using it as a computer monitor, connected by (included!) DVI cable and pretty happy with the image quality. The screen is sharp, bright and I do not have a single dead pixel (but your mileage may vary, of course). Oh, and they include the VGA cable too, just in case.

Other pleasant details are touch controls instead of buttons and a special control for fast switching between Text, Game, Cinema and User monitor profiles.

Acer also includes program utility for some fair color correction, though as I say – if you need a better one, you may need an 8 bit LCD.

There are some drawbacks, of course.

First, the screen cannot be adjusted vertically (but you can adjust tilt).

Second, as I have mentioned, this tilt changes colors slightly. If you look from below, colors seems darker.

Third, integrated speakers are not suitable for stadium concerts… well, to be frank, with 1.5 watt power they barely acceptable as desktop speakers. It’s probably a good thing one cannot connect Wii to this monitor, because it will be really hard to hear anything from the safe distance required for Wii controller.

Despite all drawback this is well deserved 5 star product. One cannot expect to buy luxury car for the price of low end sedan. In its category, for this price and as of today this monitor is a brilliant product.