Acer 50-inch 4K UHD LED TV review: Bang for your buck

TVs have been an important part of our home entertainment for a long time. They have grown in size and resolution along with getting smarter with the latest operating systems. The smart TV market is dominated by Xiaomi, Sony, Samsung and LG but there are other brands that are coming up with smart TVs having decent displays. Acer launched a budget 50-inch 4K UHD TV in 2021 as a part of its Boundless Series in India. The Taiwanese company along with its brand-licensee Indkal Technologies markets this TV in the country at a price of Rs 34,999 at both Flipkart and Amazon. Its prime competitors are Xiaomi and TCL as these brands are also offering good display panels at this budget with almost all the smart features.

It has got really sleek bezels and justifies the name with its frameless design. Inside the box, we found TV stands, documentation, the power cord along with the remote and its batteries. We have been using this TV for a couple of weeks and here is our detailed review

Acer 50-inch 4K UHD LED TV review:

The overall build quality is good and comes in a plastic shell. The stands on this TV are quite firm as well. We tried shaking it, but the stands had no give and stayed stable on the tabletop. The screen is also quite sturdy and will be able to resist knocks and pokes.

For connectivity, this TV has three HDMI 2.0 ports (one of them is ARC compatible), one ethernet port, two USB 2.0 ports, one SPDIF port, an analog TV antenna port, a 3.5mm AV input and a 3.5mm headphone port. Moreover, it also supports both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

The remote provided with the TV looks com[act and feels comfortable to hold. It has the usual shortcut buttons to popular OTT apps like Netflix, Youtube, and Prime Video. It also has a Google Assistant button that works like a walkie-talkie. You can press and hold the button for voice commands. Since the remote is Bluetooth operated you don’t need to point it at the screen to work like in traditional TVs.

Acer 50-inch 4K UHD LED TV review: Display

This is a 4K UHD LED panel with support for HDR 10+ and HLG. The peak brightness on this display is upto 420 nits which is more than enough for indoor viewing. This display has a 60Hz refresh rate like most of its competitors and it boasts a VA panel which gives it deep blacks.

However, as we used it we noticed that the colours are not vivid enough and considering the price bracket we didn’t expect it to be colour accurate. We did some heavy gaming on this display with its HDR turned on and felt satisfied with the HDR performance of the TV. Other special display features include — Intelligent Frame Stabilisation Engine, Dynamic Signal Calibration, Wide Colour Gamut, 1.07 Billion Colors, Digital Noise Reduction and Micro Dimming.

Acer 50-inch 4K UHD LED TV review: Smart features

It is powered by a quad-core Cortex A55 processor with a triple-core Mali 470 graphics unit along with 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage. It runs on AndroidTV 9.0 and is equipped with all its bells and whistles as expected from a modern smart TV. We got a system update right after we turned it on and after the update, we felt the UI getting a lot snappier than before.

However, through our tenure of usage, we also encountered two system crashes where the TV froze and we had to pull the plug. This issue might be specific to our unit which can be fixed with software updates. We tried the commonly used suite of apps including — Netflix, Hotstar, Amazon Prime Video, etc. All the apps were running smoothly with HDR support only available on Netflix.

Acer 50-inch 4K UHD LED TV review: Audio

This TV packs a dual 24W bottom-firing speaker setup with Dolby Audio and Pure Sound 2 compatibility. There are 5 presets to choose from — Sports, Standard, movie, music and News. you can also customise the sound with the equaliser present in the settings menu.

During our usage, we felt that the speakers aren’t the strong point of the TV and are only good for binging content at night.

Acer 50-inch 4K UHD LED TV review: Verdict

We have experimented a lot with the colour adjustment options of the TV, but we could never reach satisfactory levels of colour accuracy. Although Acer markets it to support Wide Colour Gamut, from our testing we noted that it was only an 8-bit panel.

Overall to conclude, this is a 50-inch 4K screen available in the market at Rs 34,999 and considering its HDR capabilities we think this is a bang for your buck.

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