So, if you weren't aware, the Dell 2405FPW 24" widescreen LCD monitor was on sale last week for a really good price. I've been in the market lately for a monitor, and the deal was so good that I couldn't pass it up; I decided to pick one up at the ridiculously low price Dell was offering and take a look at it. Worst case was that I turned around and sold the thing, or packed it up and returned it to Dell.
First impression: Man, this thing is frickin' huge.
Second impression: Boy, this thing looks good.
Third impression: Did I mention it's huge?
I've been playing around with this thing for about a week now, and it is one seriously nice monitor. No dead or stuck pixels, great backlighting, and it looks incredibly sharp connected to my computer via DVI.
The stand is much nicer than I thought it would be, and is fully adjustable for height, tilt, pivot, and rotation. Dell uses a pretty clever design with the height and tilt adjustments where pneumatics in the stand are offset exactly by the weight of the screen. The net result is that you can move it without much force, but it stays right where you want it to. The screen can, of course, be wall-mounted or put on a swing-arm, using a
standard VESA mounting bracket.
Overall picture quality is very good. It is EXTREMELY bright at the maximum setting (which is what it ships at); turning down the brightness helps picture quality quite a bit. If you are forced for some reason to use this monitor in a very bright environment, though, it can put out a bright enough picture to be usable. Black level is good for an LCD; in a darkened room, however, you can easily tell the difference in black level from a good CRT
monitor. I didn't find this to be an issue if the lights are off, but it does make darker images look washed out if the ambient light level is high.
Video performance playing DVDs was good (at least as good as any LCD HDTV I have seen), and performance with the 1080p clips from Microsoft's WMV-HD demo site is incredible.
Dell lists this as a 12ms response time LCD, and they seem to mean it. In high-contrast situations (such as moving a white cursor against a black background), there is no visible ghosting. In lower-contrast situations, it's there, but you have to look for it.
Gaming is very impressive -- if your system has the chops to run at 1920x1200, and your games support widescreen resolutions. For games that don't support widescreen, you can display 1600x1200 pillarboxed (that is, with black bars on the left and right) without any scaling or distortion. And I played around extensively with the scaling capabilities of the display -- it can upsample lower resolutions, while either maintaining the existing
aspect ratio or stretching it to fill the entire screen. It can also display lower resolutions in "1:1" mode, with black bars on all sides and no scaling whatsoever. The scaling is very good -- I saw no visible difference between having my video card do the scaling or letting the monitor handle it. Obviously, it's not as sharp as at the native resolution, but it's
certainly worlds better than some of the older LCDs I have seen.
As far as ghosting in games, it's not much of an issue. There is a *slight* blurring around the edges of moving objects (and of the screen in general when quickly rotating your view in an FPS-type game), but it is certainly better than any other LCD I have used (although see below for remarks on the VP930b). It's there if you look for it, but it became a non-factor for me after a few hours of using the display.
Quite a few of the games I had supported widescreen resolutions out of the box (or with a quick edit of a config file for anything using the Unreal engine), but a few stumped me. Dawn of War, for instance, stubbornly refused to run with a 16:10 AR (I could force a widescreen resolution, but it would only display in a 4:3 chunk of the screen). While widescreen support for games is getting better, it's certainly not 'plug and play' yet.
I also found some odd quirks with the ATI drivers' handling of widescreen resolutions. Their drivers allow you to either scale lower resolutions up to the native res of the LCD panel, or to display it 1:1 and let the panel do the scaling. With 4:3 resolutions, this worked fine. However, if I selected a 16:9 or 16:10 resolution that was lower than 1920x1200, and selected the "1:1" mode, what I actually got was a 1920x1200 output with the video card inserting black bars around the image (rather than it outputting, say, full-screen 1280x720). This is definitely a driver issue, since if I forced the "HDTV" settings (using 720P timings, for instance), it worked normally. Hopefully this will be resolved soon, but it was definitely a little weird. It would also be nice if they had a 'scale while maintaining aspect ratio' option in the drivers; if you let the card do the scaling, it would stretch 4:3 resolutions out to fill the whole 16:10 screen.
If you've read woofmeister's recent 2405FPW review, one thing he mentioned is that he found VSync to be necessary. I agree with this; with the monitor filling so much of your visual field, and the refresh rate of only 60Hz, tearing artifacts were clearly visible in every game I tried. VSync clears it up nicely, but unless you're consistently above 60FPS in a game, it can hurt performance unless you use triple buffering.
He also brought up the main reason that I am not keeping this monitor (which has hence become known, at least for now, as "Woofmeister's Law"): you need a real beast of a system to run new games at 1920x1200 (or even 1600x1200 with details above the bare minimums). While I don't mind shelling out a fair amount of dough for a monitor that I would keep for 3-5 years or more, I don't want to commit myself to having to buy a high-end video card every year to be able to use it to its fullest. You would certainly want an X1800XL or 7800GT at a minimum with this display -- but if you have the graphics horsepower to drive it, it provides a very impressive and immersive gaming experience.
Also, I've found that I'm not such a fan of an extremely wide single desktop. I've been using dual monitors both at work and home for a long while, and while the huge resolution and 16:10 AR of the 2405FPW are great for widescreen gaming or watching movies, I don't find it to be the most effective in terms of general desktop usability. Most websites and programs can't effectively scale to such a wide display in landscape mode -- and in
portrait mode, the screen is just too large for extended use (it's too tall to keep the whole thing in view unless you are sitting fairly far away). Relative to having two smaller displays, you also lose the capability to play a game fullscreen on one monitor and keep various programs visible on the second monitor. I'm also used to being able to maximize windows into a monitor, and working with a single display means you can't do that.
Certainly there's nothing stopping you from using a 2405FPW in addition to one or more other displays, but space and budget restrictions mean that's a tough thing for me to do right now. Plus it's a little weird having monitors that are drastically different in size/shape.
So, with some sadness, I have decided to part ways with the 2405FPW. I settled, eventually, on the Viewsonic VP930b (I had wanted to get the VP191b, but that model has been discontinued and replaced with the VP930, and I found a pretty decent price on the 930b). I currently have them both sitting on my desk, at least until the EBay auction closes and the 2405FPW gets shipped off.
While not as immediately impressive as the Dell widescreen, the VP930b looks pretty good. In setting it up, the stand is definitely not quite as nicely built as the one on the Dell. Of course, the Dell one pretty much has to be built like a tank to hold that screen without tipping over. Both are fully adjustable for height/tilt/pivot and can rotate the screen into a vertical position. The Dell stand adjusts further vertically, but only by about an inch. Both have integrated cable management. One thing I did notice is that it's a pain to actually plug the cables into the Viewsonic; the plugs are aligned vertically on the back of the screen, but they're so close to the body of the display that it's tough to screw the VGA/DVI connectors in. Also, the Viewsonic didn't include a DVI cable, whereas the Dell did.
In terms of image quality, both monitors are good, but I would actually give the nod to the VP930b in terms of color rendering. Colors seem a little more saturated on the Viewsonic, and you can get a truer white level even with the brightness turned down (the Dell looks good with the brightness all the way up, but it's too bright for extended use at that setting unless it is in a well-lit room, which then kills the black level). I should note that I did NOT attempt extensive calibration (just adjusting settings with some test images), nor do I have a 'professional' monitor calibration setup available, so it is possible the Dell might look as good or better once it is tweaked extensively. The Viewsonic seems pretty good with very little adjustment.
Black level is very similar between the displays, but contrast seems a little better on the Viewsonic. The Dell has VERY even backlighting (although some people have had to exchange Dell widescreens multiple times because of uneven backlighting, so YMMV), while the VP930b is slightly brighter in the upper left corner (and to a lesser extent in the other corners). This is only really visible on a completely black screen, and is far better than some cheap LCDs I have seen, so I wouldn't hold this against the Viewsonic. It's also possible that the one I have is worse than average in this regard.
Ghosting is minimal on both screens, but slightly better overall on the Viewsonic. While THG hasn't reviewed the VP930b yet, they did review the VP191b (which uses either an identical or very similar panel, with both using Overdrive). The VP191b scored a very consistent 16ms response time across all color transitions, making it one of the fastest 8-bit LCD monitors on the market. More aggressively overdriven monitors, like the VX924, get lower response times -- but at the price of having a 6-bit panel, and being susceptible to 'sparkling' effects in video. I don't see any of this on the VP930b. You can see ghosting if you look specifically for it on either display, and the image softens slightly while turning in an FPS game, but the VP930b is slightly better in both these regards. Both are very good for gaming.
Ultimately, for my needs right now, the VP930b is a better choice (and I'm keeping my slowly-dying Viewsonic PS790 as a second display). It won't require frequent video card upgrades to play games at native resolution, and I won't feel so bad retiring it if I find in a few years that I need an HDCP-capable monitor. I have no doubts that given a few more generations of graphics card development, and the availability of a cheaper 24" 1080P widescreen LCD with HDCP, I'll be back to something like the 2405FPW. Well, at least unless OLED and/or SED displays render LCDs obsolete. But for right now, I'm going with the VP930b.
First impression: Man, this thing is frickin' huge.
Second impression: Boy, this thing looks good.
Third impression: Did I mention it's huge?
I've been playing around with this thing for about a week now, and it is one seriously nice monitor. No dead or stuck pixels, great backlighting, and it looks incredibly sharp connected to my computer via DVI.
The stand is much nicer than I thought it would be, and is fully adjustable for height, tilt, pivot, and rotation. Dell uses a pretty clever design with the height and tilt adjustments where pneumatics in the stand are offset exactly by the weight of the screen. The net result is that you can move it without much force, but it stays right where you want it to. The screen can, of course, be wall-mounted or put on a swing-arm, using a
standard VESA mounting bracket.
Overall picture quality is very good. It is EXTREMELY bright at the maximum setting (which is what it ships at); turning down the brightness helps picture quality quite a bit. If you are forced for some reason to use this monitor in a very bright environment, though, it can put out a bright enough picture to be usable. Black level is good for an LCD; in a darkened room, however, you can easily tell the difference in black level from a good CRT
monitor. I didn't find this to be an issue if the lights are off, but it does make darker images look washed out if the ambient light level is high.
Video performance playing DVDs was good (at least as good as any LCD HDTV I have seen), and performance with the 1080p clips from Microsoft's WMV-HD demo site is incredible.
Dell lists this as a 12ms response time LCD, and they seem to mean it. In high-contrast situations (such as moving a white cursor against a black background), there is no visible ghosting. In lower-contrast situations, it's there, but you have to look for it.
Gaming is very impressive -- if your system has the chops to run at 1920x1200, and your games support widescreen resolutions. For games that don't support widescreen, you can display 1600x1200 pillarboxed (that is, with black bars on the left and right) without any scaling or distortion. And I played around extensively with the scaling capabilities of the display -- it can upsample lower resolutions, while either maintaining the existing
aspect ratio or stretching it to fill the entire screen. It can also display lower resolutions in "1:1" mode, with black bars on all sides and no scaling whatsoever. The scaling is very good -- I saw no visible difference between having my video card do the scaling or letting the monitor handle it. Obviously, it's not as sharp as at the native resolution, but it's
certainly worlds better than some of the older LCDs I have seen.
As far as ghosting in games, it's not much of an issue. There is a *slight* blurring around the edges of moving objects (and of the screen in general when quickly rotating your view in an FPS-type game), but it is certainly better than any other LCD I have used (although see below for remarks on the VP930b). It's there if you look for it, but it became a non-factor for me after a few hours of using the display.
Quite a few of the games I had supported widescreen resolutions out of the box (or with a quick edit of a config file for anything using the Unreal engine), but a few stumped me. Dawn of War, for instance, stubbornly refused to run with a 16:10 AR (I could force a widescreen resolution, but it would only display in a 4:3 chunk of the screen). While widescreen support for games is getting better, it's certainly not 'plug and play' yet.
I also found some odd quirks with the ATI drivers' handling of widescreen resolutions. Their drivers allow you to either scale lower resolutions up to the native res of the LCD panel, or to display it 1:1 and let the panel do the scaling. With 4:3 resolutions, this worked fine. However, if I selected a 16:9 or 16:10 resolution that was lower than 1920x1200, and selected the "1:1" mode, what I actually got was a 1920x1200 output with the video card inserting black bars around the image (rather than it outputting, say, full-screen 1280x720). This is definitely a driver issue, since if I forced the "HDTV" settings (using 720P timings, for instance), it worked normally. Hopefully this will be resolved soon, but it was definitely a little weird. It would also be nice if they had a 'scale while maintaining aspect ratio' option in the drivers; if you let the card do the scaling, it would stretch 4:3 resolutions out to fill the whole 16:10 screen.
If you've read woofmeister's recent 2405FPW review, one thing he mentioned is that he found VSync to be necessary. I agree with this; with the monitor filling so much of your visual field, and the refresh rate of only 60Hz, tearing artifacts were clearly visible in every game I tried. VSync clears it up nicely, but unless you're consistently above 60FPS in a game, it can hurt performance unless you use triple buffering.
He also brought up the main reason that I am not keeping this monitor (which has hence become known, at least for now, as "Woofmeister's Law"): you need a real beast of a system to run new games at 1920x1200 (or even 1600x1200 with details above the bare minimums). While I don't mind shelling out a fair amount of dough for a monitor that I would keep for 3-5 years or more, I don't want to commit myself to having to buy a high-end video card every year to be able to use it to its fullest. You would certainly want an X1800XL or 7800GT at a minimum with this display -- but if you have the graphics horsepower to drive it, it provides a very impressive and immersive gaming experience.
Also, I've found that I'm not such a fan of an extremely wide single desktop. I've been using dual monitors both at work and home for a long while, and while the huge resolution and 16:10 AR of the 2405FPW are great for widescreen gaming or watching movies, I don't find it to be the most effective in terms of general desktop usability. Most websites and programs can't effectively scale to such a wide display in landscape mode -- and in
portrait mode, the screen is just too large for extended use (it's too tall to keep the whole thing in view unless you are sitting fairly far away). Relative to having two smaller displays, you also lose the capability to play a game fullscreen on one monitor and keep various programs visible on the second monitor. I'm also used to being able to maximize windows into a monitor, and working with a single display means you can't do that.
Certainly there's nothing stopping you from using a 2405FPW in addition to one or more other displays, but space and budget restrictions mean that's a tough thing for me to do right now. Plus it's a little weird having monitors that are drastically different in size/shape.
So, with some sadness, I have decided to part ways with the 2405FPW. I settled, eventually, on the Viewsonic VP930b (I had wanted to get the VP191b, but that model has been discontinued and replaced with the VP930, and I found a pretty decent price on the 930b). I currently have them both sitting on my desk, at least until the EBay auction closes and the 2405FPW gets shipped off.
While not as immediately impressive as the Dell widescreen, the VP930b looks pretty good. In setting it up, the stand is definitely not quite as nicely built as the one on the Dell. Of course, the Dell one pretty much has to be built like a tank to hold that screen without tipping over. Both are fully adjustable for height/tilt/pivot and can rotate the screen into a vertical position. The Dell stand adjusts further vertically, but only by about an inch. Both have integrated cable management. One thing I did notice is that it's a pain to actually plug the cables into the Viewsonic; the plugs are aligned vertically on the back of the screen, but they're so close to the body of the display that it's tough to screw the VGA/DVI connectors in. Also, the Viewsonic didn't include a DVI cable, whereas the Dell did.
In terms of image quality, both monitors are good, but I would actually give the nod to the VP930b in terms of color rendering. Colors seem a little more saturated on the Viewsonic, and you can get a truer white level even with the brightness turned down (the Dell looks good with the brightness all the way up, but it's too bright for extended use at that setting unless it is in a well-lit room, which then kills the black level). I should note that I did NOT attempt extensive calibration (just adjusting settings with some test images), nor do I have a 'professional' monitor calibration setup available, so it is possible the Dell might look as good or better once it is tweaked extensively. The Viewsonic seems pretty good with very little adjustment.
Black level is very similar between the displays, but contrast seems a little better on the Viewsonic. The Dell has VERY even backlighting (although some people have had to exchange Dell widescreens multiple times because of uneven backlighting, so YMMV), while the VP930b is slightly brighter in the upper left corner (and to a lesser extent in the other corners). This is only really visible on a completely black screen, and is far better than some cheap LCDs I have seen, so I wouldn't hold this against the Viewsonic. It's also possible that the one I have is worse than average in this regard.
Ghosting is minimal on both screens, but slightly better overall on the Viewsonic. While THG hasn't reviewed the VP930b yet, they did review the VP191b (which uses either an identical or very similar panel, with both using Overdrive). The VP191b scored a very consistent 16ms response time across all color transitions, making it one of the fastest 8-bit LCD monitors on the market. More aggressively overdriven monitors, like the VX924, get lower response times -- but at the price of having a 6-bit panel, and being susceptible to 'sparkling' effects in video. I don't see any of this on the VP930b. You can see ghosting if you look specifically for it on either display, and the image softens slightly while turning in an FPS game, but the VP930b is slightly better in both these regards. Both are very good for gaming.
Ultimately, for my needs right now, the VP930b is a better choice (and I'm keeping my slowly-dying Viewsonic PS790 as a second display). It won't require frequent video card upgrades to play games at native resolution, and I won't feel so bad retiring it if I find in a few years that I need an HDCP-capable monitor. I have no doubts that given a few more generations of graphics card development, and the availability of a cheaper 24" 1080P widescreen LCD with HDCP, I'll be back to something like the 2405FPW. Well, at least unless OLED and/or SED displays render LCDs obsolete. But for right now, I'm going with the VP930b.