The Clover Trail (Atom Z2760) Review: Acer's W510 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 20, 2012 10:34 AM ESTThe Display
Acer uses an LG sourced 10.1-inch 1366 x 768 IPS panel for the W510. Viewing angles are great as are the rest of the basics. Max brightness is pretty low at just under 300 nits, but the flip side of that coin are very low black levels resulting in great contrast. Compared to the netbooks that Acer was shipping just a few years ago, the W510 is worlds better.
The low max brightness makes the W510 not ideal for use outdoors in bright sunlight:
Color accuracy out of the box isn’t great, but it’s really no worse than something like the Nexus 10 if you look at our CalMAN results.
Once again I turned to our own Chris Heinonen's CalMAN smartphone/tablet workflow. We'll start off by looking at the calibrated white point for these tablets. What you're looking for here is a number close to 6500K:
The next three charts look at accuracy represented as a difference between various source colors and what's reproduced on the display. The results are presented as average dE2000, with lower numbers being better.
First up is Grayscale performance, here we're looking at the accuracy of black, white and 19 shades of gray spread in between the two extremes:
First in our color accuracy tests is a saturation sweep. Here we're looking at 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100% saturations of red, blue, green, magenta, yellow and cyan.
Gamut CIE Chart
Saturation CIE Chart
For our final accuracy test we're looking at the difference between a Gretag Macbeth colorchecker chart and the rendered swatches on these displays. Once again, lower numbers are better.
GMB Color Checker
Acer doesn’t really make an effort to calibrate the display at the factory, but there’s not too much room for improvement here based on my calibration passes (I managed to get dE down to the mid 4s compared to the GMB chart). Nothing about the W510’s display really looks bad, but it does lack that extra oomph of Apple’s 3rd and 4th gen iPad with Retina Display. Microsoft did a better job on color accuracy with the panel in Surface RT. On the bright side, the display really is such a huge improvement over what we’re used to seeing from a Windows PC priced at $499.
The relatively small display size means the native resolution isn’t really too much of a problem. More resolution would always be appreciated, but in this case Clover Trail doesn’t really have the GPU to drive it. In my experience with the W510 I didn’t really find myself wishing I had a higher resolution display, although I’d be very surprised if the next-generation of these tablets didn’t ship with something higher res.
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coder543 - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Nexus 10 starting price is $399, not $499.Please fix.
coder543 - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Also, the reported SunSpider time on the Nexus 10 is only for Chrome. If you were to try any other common browser, like Dolphin, you'd see a SunSpider range in the ~800ms range. Chrome is just poorly optimized for JavaScript for whatever reason.jeffkibuule - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
I think the problem is that Chrome just isn't optimized at all compared to the stock Android browser on non-Google phones.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Fixed, thank you!coder543 - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
"Optimizing around 16:9 delivers a much better video viewing and multitasking experience, at the expense of pretty much ruining portrait mode aspirations and making for a slightly awkward in-hand feel."I'd also like to point out that this is an opinion and not a fact. I, for one, really enjoy using widescreen devices in portrait mode. Do you know just how much of a website is visible that way? A huge amount. It takes a little getting used to, but it is not by any means awkward.
Poopship - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
I really like the idea of being able to run any old windows program and then switch back and forth from a modern tablet interface. It just adds so much versatility.Too bad about the gpu though.
nswalls - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
what breed of dog is that in the video?ojingoh - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Looks like a red heeler, a type of Australian Cattle Dog.nswalls - Friday, December 21, 2012 - link
thanks!tayb - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Battery life, performance, price. Pick any two. It's pretty clear that despite the best efforts of Microsoft and Intel that this narrative hasn't changed in the slightest. At $499 this is more expensive than other entry level tablets, the battery life is inferior, and the relative performance is crap.This device cannot replace my notebook and for a toy device (iPad, Nexus, Tab) I would rather stick with my iPad. I look at this tablet and see the worst of both worlds. Performance is too low to replace my notebook and app selection and battery life are too low to replace my existing tablet. No man's land. What use case would I have to find myself in where this tablet was the solution? I can think of a few fields (medical, dental, outside sales, construction, etc) but most of these are small trades. I see no mass market appeal in this device.