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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popej - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Could we get some comments how does it work as a tablet?Does Metro menu work efficient? Is on-screen keyboard usable? Has it sensors like accelerator, compass, GPS? Does it switch to portrait mode automatically? Any peculiarity with Metro in portrait mode? Is it usable outdoor? Is SD memory usable?
Thanks for review and benchmarks but I feel like I got more questions than answers ;)
mrdude - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/141317-samsungs-...Supposedly the WiFi problems aren't restricted to the Acer W510 and Intel admitted there's an issue with the Samsung PC 500T.
Are these the same problems you're encountering? It sounds like some users have had similar issues as well.
That brand new Clover Trail SoC already looks dated :D Matches up nicely with the Tegra 3, but if I can buy a Google Nexus 7 for less than half the price of this Acer, and get better performance at that, it really shows just how out of touch both Intel and MS are in the mobile space where tablets are concerned.
bollux78 - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Really, even if the performance is not very good, you can run anything, ANYTHING!Forget the tablets, I would not trade a x86 tablet in the present for an Ipad 15 coming from the future in a time traveler's bag with 30x more horsepower, unless you could run some virtual machine able to emulated a complete x86 machine. There is simply nothing to complain about this device.
kyuu - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
You do have a point, in that sure, the iPadWhatever has an impressive SoC, particularly the GPU. But... so what? What can you do with it? Play some "meh" mobile games?Still, I'd like to see an x86 Win8 tablet with something better than a rehashed Atom attached to a dismal GPU.
kyuu - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
I should add, I'd like to see that in a truly mobile tablet, not a big, battery-chugging monolith as the Surface Pro is likely to be (much as it may be appealing otherwise).dwade123 - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Move aside ARM, Intel is coming through.DaveSimmons - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Just like the steamroller in Austin Powers: very . . . . verrrry . . . . slowwwwllllyyyyDonkey2008 - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
LOL. Absolutely perfect analogy.lopri - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
If the 64 GB version leaves you with 30 GB.. then how much space is left usable for the 32 GB version??kyuu - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Negative 2 GB? o_0