The Acer Aspire V5-572P Touch’s plain iron-grey chassis may not look very inspiring from the outside, but this is a surprisingly thin touchscreen laptop. Measuring just 23mm thick when closed with a weight of 2.2kg, it’s one of the more portable 15.6in laptops we’ve seen in recent months. The laptop's build quality is also excellent, as we saw hardly any flex in the lid or keyboard tray.
At first glance, it seems the V5-572P Touch has almost no ports, as there are just two USB2 ports, an SD card reader and a combined headphone and microphone jack on the sides. Fortunately, the rest are hidden away on the rear of the laptop, making it easier to tidy away any cables that might be attached. Here you’ll find an HDMI video output, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a USB3 port and a proprietary port for the laptop’s bundled VGA adaptor. It’s a shame the USB3 port isn’t located on the side instead of one of the other USB ports, but we’re pleased to see one nonetheless. There's plenty of space to store your files, too, as it comes with a 750GB hard disk.
The 15.6in touchscreen was a joy to use. Its 1,366x768 resolution was the perfect size for tapping icons and minimising windows, and Windows 8 gestures were extremely responsive. As we’d expect from a laptop at this price, the screen quality wasn’t brilliant, but it was still adequate for everyday tasks. We measured its sRGB colour gamut at 60.1 per cent, which is around average for a laptop screen. Reds, greens and blues didn’t look particularly deep, but the screen’s glossy finish did help our solid colour image tests look a little more vibrant than laptops with matt screens.
Blacks were high as well, measuring 0.68cd/m2. This meant solid blacks were riddled with grey depending on the angle of the screen, and we found it difficult to get a uniform colour across the whole screen due to the laptop’s narrow viewing angles. This is a common problem on budget laptops, but while it’s not particularly noticeable when browsing the web or typing text documents, it made a big difference to the clarity of our high contrast test images.
With a measured contrast ratio of 334:1, we found it difficult to see any kind of detail in our high contrast test photos unless we were looking at the screen head-on. That said, blacks were deeper and colours looked a lot more natural than the V5-572P Touch's almost identical rival, the Asus VivoBook X550CA . The V5-572P Touch's screen was also much brighter than the X550CA, making it easier to look at in lower lighting conditions.
