The Acer Aspire S7-393 Review: Broadwell Comes To Acer's Ultrabook
by Brett Howse on October 5, 2015 8:00 AM ESTDisplay
Acer does offer the Aspire S7 with a 2560x1440 display, but the model shipped to me has the base 1920x1080 IPS panel. This touch panel has a full RGB stripe and being IPS offers great off-angle viewing. The move to 2560x1440 would give slightly crisper text but at the cost of battery life, so it is a choice to not be taken lightly.
The panel itself is an AUO model and right away one of the first things I noticed was that there is quite a bit more backlight bleed than there should be on a notebook at this price range. There is visible leakage on the sides which is not too distracting, but also some uneven blacks. It’s not a huge issue though and is really only noticeable when the display is completely black but the backlight is on a bright setting.
To measure the display characteristics, we use SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 suite with a custom workflow. Contrast and brightness levels are measures with an X-Rite i1DisplayPro colorimeter, and color accuracy is checked with an X-Rite i1Pro spectrophotometer.
Brightness and Contrast
The Acer S7 gets to 391 nits at 100% brightness which is generally plenty bright for more notebook tasks. Decent black levels lead to a static contrast of 934:1. It is not quite as good as the Sharp IGZO panels but a reasonable result.
Grayscale
As you can see in the results, the grayscale is overall 4.16 which is not a terrible result, but the greens really creep up as the display gets closer to 100% white causing noticeable errors as the white value goes up. Color temperature is higher than it should be at 7077 and gamma is also a bit high.
Saturation
Saturation is where the Acer’s display falls on its face. An overall value of 6.72 is not the worst we have ever seen (by a long shot) but on a $1400 Ultrabook there are some major issues when the display can’t cover the sRGB color space. 100% blue is registering as only 60% blue, which combined with the compressed reds cause the magenta to also be very compressed. The Acer S7 only actually covers 72% of the sRGB gamut which is a very poor performance.
GMB
The Gretag Macbeth colorchecker is a more comprehensive test. It comes in at not a terrible result at 4.29 but you can visibly see how much of the blue and magenta gamut is just missing from the result. Good scores on the green, yellow, and decent grayscale help pull this score back to a reasonable result, but in the end we are looking for a dE of less than three, which the S7 does not meet in any of these tests.
Color Comparator
Since discussing color inaccuracies can be difficult to comprehend with just numbers, the above images are a relative comparison of what color is called for (on the bottom) and the color that is reproduced by this display (on the top) with a focus on this being a relative comparison. Any inaccuracies in your own monitor will shift the results for both values. You can really see how the blue values are just not anywhere near as blue as they should be.
Calibrated
Since this is a Windows PC, we can calibrate the display to try and get a better result, however without a 3D Look Up Table the only thing that can really be fixed is gamma and grayscale.
Once calibrated, the grayscale comes out much better, which helps pull the GMB score down further since whites and blacks are part of that test. The saturation sweep shows no difference though.
When a company sells a device for this price, you have to expect and demand better than the display in this notebook. It is really unacceptable to have a display which covers just 72% of sRGB at this price point. The competition has come out with some pretty fantastic displays over the last year or two, so Acer needs to step up their game. It is no longer good enough to just include an IPS panel, at least not at this price. When a $500 Microsoft Surface 3 can come with a fantastically accurate display out of the box, others can do it too.
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Sietse Vliegen - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
OK. I've been using one for about a year now. I have the i7 with the 2560x1440 display. Simply a brilliant piece of equipment.Unlike some of you, I have no preference for a particular brand. But I needed a sturdy reliable machine as I am on the road most of the time for business. Hence, the price was also not a decisive factor. In the past I have used laptops from Samsung, Toshiba, IBM, Lenovo, Apple. All of them had issues sooner or later. Therefore, I do not believe that any particular brand will guarantee a trouble free laptop future. I'm sure I'll have some issues with Acer too, eventually. But so far so good and boy, I do like this machine, a lot.
At the time I looked at the HP Spectre . Promising, but sold out pretty much everywhere. Didn't like the rubber surface on the Dell XPS, gets stained after a while. Didn't like the hinges on the Lenovo Yoga 3, looks like a weak point. Not enthusiastic about the Macbook Pro 13 inch either, especially the rough edges. And I need a Windows machine, for business purposes, not a Macbook running Parallels desktop or similar. Looked at the Acer, couldn't figure out why they chose a SSD raid config either. But I did like the look and feel of the machine, and most specs were on par with the other machines.
Ended up buying the Acer, and I must say I am impressed. Build quality is excellent, sturdy aluminium top, gorilla glass cover. Heck, you can even use it as a whiteboard. In business meetings, everyone wants to know what type of laptop it is, and checks how thin/light it is.
I use it almost every day and it is 100% silent most of the time, only at full load the fan spins up, but never gets really noisy. The 2560x1440 display is simply gorgeous. Everyone loves it. No problems with scaling of fonts or apps using Windows 8.1 or 10 (never tried Windows 8).
I have no problem with the flimsy powerplug. In fact, I think it's an advantage that it easily unplug from the laptop when someone trips over the power cord. But obviously, Apple's solution is even better.
The keyboard is fine. Spacing is ok and I can type really fast without any problems. I would prefer separate function keys, though. The silver color of the keys does not bother me one bit. The only minor niggle I have is that the keyboard backlight makes a slight whining noise at maximum brightness. Throttle down a bit and it's gone.
I don't understand the issue the reviewer has with *only* two USB ports. I use a Logitech Ultrathin T630 bluetooth mouse, which doesn't need a USB port anyway. Occasionally I use a USB stick. That leaves at least one spare USB port.
The reviewer states also that the displayport and the mini HDMI port could have been combined. Whereas that may be true, the simple fact remains that in business environments, most projectors/beamers either have an HDMI or VGA connector. DisplayPort is still pretty scarce although I do use it at home. HDMI works 100% of the time. VGA uses a dongle which is not always compatible with old plasma screens, so I found out: the laptop freezes until you unplug it from the screen.
Finally, the battery lasts about 6-7 hours, depending on what it is I'm doing (mostly office apps and webbrowsing). For business use that is excellent. In fact, I can usually use it for several days without charging. My previous $1500 Samsung notebook lasted only 3 hours or so.
All in all, I am extremely happy with this machine and I would definitely buy it again.
maccomb - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Hi,I also bought the Acer S7-392. The looks are amazing but that is subjective.
What is not subjective is how good the 2560x1440 screen is; the battery time; how thin and light it is. It's now August 2016 and I bought this pc (where I'm typing) long time ago... don't really know 2 years or 3 ago? The gorilla glass cover is great, no scratches, no stains, nothing. It still as nice as when bought. Same for the screen itself. The keyboard: I also feel the lack of the dedicated Function key row, but other than that, it's great and the best compared to other ultrthin I know (asus and lenovo). I also don't understand the complaints on the SSD raid 0. Either I'm ignorant or you are... this provides me with aprox 1GB/s transfer rate. Specially when moving movies around from SSD to 1gbps network or to a fast USB3.0 external disk. As far as a I know, only Sony Vaio had something similar (4xraid0 or someting). It's as ran windows 7.. which I loved, then upgraded to 8.1 which was so-so, and now finally Windows 10 which is a great OS (and I'm a strong linux supporter mind you, for servers).
I reached to this article just because what I really wanted is to know if there was a newer version to buy, with more memory or more disk. I'm an intensive business pro user with virtualization running Linux, and lots of Office and all day long email and stuff... So you see. It's a light, slim, hardcore machine. I actually think that Acer has a bad trackrecord and must have created this S7 at this price to try to change it's image. It's unfair people look this laptop down without even testing it. My previous machine was a ibm thinkpad and toshibas before that. Oh well I just hope they keep making money from this line so they keep developing it.
maccomb - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Hi,I also bought the Acer S7-392. The looks are amazing but that is subjective.
What is not subjective is how good the 2560x1440 screen is; the battery time; how thin and light it is. It's now August 2016 and I bought this pc (where I'm typing) long time ago... don't really know 2 years or 3 ago? The gorilla glass cover is great, no scratches, no stains, nothing. It still as nice as when bought. Same for the screen itself. The keyboard: I also feel the lack of the dedicated Function key row, but other than that, it's great and the best compared to other ultrthin I know (asus and lenovo). I also don't understand the complaints on the SSD raid 0. Either I'm ignorant or you are... this provides me with aprox 1GB/s transfer rate. Specially when moving movies around from SSD to 1gbps network or to a fast USB3.0 external disk. As far as a I know, only Sony Vaio had something similar (4xraid0 or someting). It's as ran windows 7.. which I loved, then upgraded to 8.1 which was so-so, and now finally Windows 10 which is a great OS (and I'm a strong linux supporter mind you, for servers).
I reached to this article just because what I really wanted is to know if there was a newer version to buy, with more memory or more disk. I'm an intensive business pro user with virtualization running Linux, and lots of Office and all day long email and stuff... So you see. It's a light, slim, hardcore machine. I actually think that Acer has a bad trackrecord and must have created this S7 at this price to try to change it's image. It's unfair people look this laptop down without even testing it. My previous machine was a ibm thinkpad and toshibas before that. Oh well I just hope they keep making money from this line so they keep developing it.