Acer Aspire 2020 - Centrino desktop replacement

Features - Aspire Arcade (cont.)

The two most appealing features of the Aspire Arcade are the Cinema Vision and Clear Vision features, both of which we saw in Computex 2003.

• Cinema Vision: manipulates 4:3 video into the 16:9 format without stretching it
• Clear Vision: automatically changes video properties such as saturation, brightness, and contrast on a frame-by-frame basis to provide sharper and more aesthetically appealing images

Our original issue with these features was that we thought it could be used on video files, as that is what we previewed in Taiwan. However, it seems to be limited to DVDs (aka the Cinema mode) and only if you play within Windows.

Note the first set of pictures, where we tagged the vertical position of the screen without Cinema Vision with yellow paper. Enabling Cinema Vision with the native source already in the 16:9 format seems to use vertical stretching, though it claims no stretching occurs. People in the distance seem proportionally larger, but people up close seem to have an effect of being taller, yet it is not really noticeable unless you compare the two images. In this case, there seems to be no horizontal cropping or stretching, but there is some vertical scaling or drawing more pixel lines, for that matter. A good example of this would be the lamp in the upper left hand corner of the screen. We should mention that we could not see any noticeable degree of vertical quality degradation.

16:9 DVD viewed without Cinema Vision
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16:9 DVD viewed with Cinema Vision
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The menu on this DVD isn't exactly 16:9 format; we are showing it so that you get a sense of how CV interacts in different environments. Note how the second picture has an increased white bar in the upper left hand corner. It looks like that here; it clips part of the horizontal space and scales up.

DVD menu viewed without Cinema Vision
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DVD menu viewed with Cinema Vision
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This is a 4:3 DVD seen with and without CV, and it is the way that it was intended to be used. In this instance, there seems to be some horizontal stretching, though it seems to keep the text proportionally correct. It seems to us that there is no vertical cutting, so CV actually draws more horizontal lines in accordance with the image. We haven't come across instances where CV screws up the viewed 4:3 image, but we would assume that there are going to be instances in which it occurs. Shutting off CV (hit escape when in Cinema mode and go into settings) should alleviate the problem.

4:3 DVD viewed without Cinema Vision
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4:3 DVD viewed with Cinema Vision
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Clear Vision is a more ambiguous technology. Without actually resorting to photos, it is extremely hard to show the technology enabled. And since Aspire Arcade uses some form of overlay to display video, we were actually unable to capture via HyperSnap or SnagIt. Basically, what you need to know is that it kind of works in most cases, but it is like Cinema Vision in the sense that it can actually make the viewed image worse for viewing than it originally was.