Acer PD163Q Portable Monitor Review: Dual Displays Can Mean Double the Trouble

The Acer PD163Q is an interesting portable setup: It combines two displays into a single unit, theoretically making it as convenient to bring two displays as one. At $329, it’s not a bad bargain for two portable monitors. The screens even deliver an impressive color gamut compared to many competitors. Those benefits are overshadowed by a few shortcomings. 

For one, the build quality is underwhelming, even for the price. The displays may have broad color gamuts, but they don’t render colors very accurately, and they deviate a lot between each other — possibly because their white points are way too cool or blue. 

Although the setup is meant to work with just a single USB-C cable to a laptop with a sufficiently powered connection, it requires a special USB display driver. I was able to get it working once, but it refused to even light up a single display afterward over a USB-C connection. Instead, it required three separate connections to get fully functional. The software appears to be the culprit, and there’s little guarantee others will have more luck than I did, as I tested with various cables and multiple computers and power sources. 

Since the Acer PD163Q is also fairly thick and heavy, it also has to compete with portable monitors that stick to a more traditional design. It’s close to the price of two 16-inch Arzopa Z1RC monitors ($189 apiece, although often on sale for closer to $120), which would offer more overall screen area, higher resolution, higher brightness and still work out to be thinner and nearly as light. Even if the Acer PD163Q proved more reliable, the benefit of two extra displays with a single cable connection wouldn’t make up for its otherwise fairly basic performance and disappointing build.   

Acer PD163Q

Price	$329
Size (diagonal)	2 x 15.6 in/39.6 cm
Panel and backlight	IPS
Flat or curved	Flat
Resolution and pixel density	1,920 x 1,080 141 ppi
Aspect ratio	16:9
Maximum gamut	99% P3
Rated brightness (nits, peak/typical)	250/250
HDR	No
Adaptive sync	No
Max vertical refresh rate	60Hz
Gray-to-gray response time	8ms
Connections	1x Mini HDMI, 2x USB-C
Audio	Headphone jack, stereo speakers
VESA mountable	75×75
Panel warranty	Three year limited
Release date	May 2024

Design and build fall short

When folded, the PD163Q looks a lot like a closed laptop; like a cheap Acer laptop, with a middling plastic build. The two displays share a somewhat flimsy hinge that doesn’t hold stiffly at the open angle and allows for quite a bit of wiggle, even while the display is closed. The two displays are just 0.6 inches thick combined, but there’s a dock with ports, controls, mounting holes and a kickstand built onto the back. It doesn’t span the whole back but still bumps up the thickness by 0.3 inches, making the whole unit 0.9 inches thick. At 3.1 pounds, the PD163Q ends up weighing about as much as the kind of laptop that might include one of its displays.

The metal kickstand is sturdier and has a stiffer hinge. It holds position quite well, although when it reaches the last few degrees at either end of its 180-degree range, it snaps forcefully into position. Like the display hinge, it has some play at the extreme ends. Magnets hold it together when shut, but it can flop about a bit when swung all the way open. 

The screens on the PD163Q are matte plastic, and they’re surrounded by rather thin bezels (because the top screen’s bottom is the same as the bottom screen’s top bezel). I’m far more used to seeing thick bottom bezels on these displays.

The PD163Q has speakers, but like many built-ins, they’re not good: They sound like they’re enclosed in flimsy plastic, they lack power and can become grating to listen to for any length of time.

Behind the right edge of the lower display, you’ll find a 3.5mm audio jack and a shallow set of controls. These are difficult to get at with a fingertip because of how nestled they are. Using them, you get access to Acer’s control menus, which offer different picture profiles, color temperature options, audio control and input source selection. Given the tricky positioning of the controls, it’s a bit of a pain to navigate and make adjustments.

Connection problems

On the opposite side are two USB-C ports and a Mini HDMI connector. Acer includes all the necessary cabling: One Mini HDMI to full-size HDMI cable, a USB A-to-C cable, a USB-C data cable, a USB-C cable meant only for charging and a small 30-watt power brick. Unfortunately, even with all this, I wasn’t able to get around some serious connectivity issues.  

For one, the monitor failed to reconnect over USB-C after the first success. I tried different USB-C cables and different ports on different computers. I tested with multiple USB-C connections coming from one computer and with an external power connection going directly to the monitor. 

Sometimes the laptop would recognize that an external display had been connected, but the Acer PD163Q would still not show an image. On a second laptop, the monitor provided access to a file to install the USB drivers, but since it wasn’t receiving a video signal, the monitor went back to sleep and rescinded that file access before the installation could be completed. Even trying to manually launch the Win USB App — which ran non-stop after installation in the first round of testing — wouldn’t get the display working properly again. 

Only HDMI worked, but the HDMI-to-Mini HDMI cable only sends a signal to the lower screen. Here’s the kicker: once the display was operating over HDMI, it would receive a second signal over the USB connection. If I removed the HDMI cable, both signals dropped. The monitor ultimately became a wiring nightmare completely at odds with its portable productivity purposes. Factor in the light pass-through charging it can provide even if it does work properly, and it can get troublesome. 

It’s a surprisingly decent display once you get past the hurdles. It’s not terribly bright, capping out at just 251 nits. It’s 99% P3 color gamut coverage is big for a budget display, let alone two. It does have a slightly cool color temperature overall and a default mode for the lower screen that’s practically blue at 11500K. Contrast is typical for IPS panels, sitting at around 1,000:1. 

The upper display struggled to match the contrast of the lower display. Its color temperature and color accuracy between the two could also vary considerably; overall this isn’t a great choice if you care about accuracy, despite an average delta E 1976 of about 2 in modes where you expect it.

Acer’s various picture modes tweak the gamma curves, brightness, and contrast. The results vary, but only the FPS setting stands out as a bad adjustment, as it raises black levels and drops contrast to just 470:1. Although the Acer PD163Q has a small handful of gaming picture modes, it does very little to actually offer a gaming experience, with the slow pixel response of IPS and a bog-standard 60Hz refresh rate. 

The concept of a portable dual-monitor setup is great, but execution matters too — and sadly, this one’s a disappointment.

How we test portable monitors

Measurements for the Acer PD163Q were taken using a Spyder X2 Ultra colorimeter using DataColor’s Spyder X2 software for SDR. Color accuracy measurement results are reported in Delta E 1976 using Datacolor’s 48-color patch test.

In addition, HDR results were gathered using the VESA DisplayHDR Test app’s patterns to display 100% and 10% windows for brightness measurements as well as RGBW values, again measured using the Spyder X2 Ultra, to get CIE xyY color values and compared against the DCI-P3 color space’s xyY color values to calculate HDR gamut coverage using this gamut calculator.

On the most basic models, we may stick with just brightness, contrast and color gamut, while on more capable displays we may run tests of most user-selectable modes for gaming or color-critical usage, uniformity and so on. For the color work, we may also run tests to verify how white point accuracy varies with brightness. We also use Blur Busters’ motion tests to judge motion artifacts (such as ghosting) or refresh rate-related problems that can affect gaming. 

Keep in mind that individual results can vary from a manufacturer’s reported results for a variety of reasons. For instance, you can be using a different set of color patches for the accuracy tests (as I do), a different colorimeter (as most individuals do), a different way of calculating (such as determining gamut using RGB and CMY primaries rather than the more common RGB only), monitor settings (manufacturers rarely provide the OSD settings used for its tests) and so on. There are actually a ton of variables.