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17 out of 19 people found this review helpful
2.5 stars
"average at best, not true 8bit, poor shading and shadow detail"
Pros: size, price, lack of backlight bleed, little lag
Cons: banding, no 1080i, terrible for photoshop and subtle photo and DVD viewing
Summary: Looks great, nice stand, fantastic price, great size, very little backlight bleed, very sharp, not much lag for a 24" LCD, quickly reaches full brightness, has tons of inputs BUT:
1. fake 8bit. really 6 + 2dither bit, so it has a tedency to band, apparent on many websites, windows XP logon, photos have less subtle shading, shadow detail merges all to black unless turned up very bright and adjusted (which makes more banding) and this is with latest A02 revision. gradients in photoshop look horrible. Dell warns to not color profile and to not use Adobe Gamma, because this further increase banding. Samsung 244t uses same panel, but exhibits vastly more subtle and smooth shading with much better shadow detail even with brightness low.
2. no true 1080i over any input, either out of range or de-laced by simply dropping every other field (way worse than 2405)
3. gray object quickly moving over bright backgrounds leave a shimmery yellow, pink or green trail a few pixels wide (like quickly scrolling a window or moving mouse)
in sum: unless you are an absolute die-hard FPS player and lag time is life and death to you and you need to be able to aim to the pixel, forget this and grab the Samsung 244t (with the recent price drop, it doesn't even cost much more now) or wait to see the upcoming stuff in the Fall and early winter. Could've been great, but Dell cheaped out on a couple components and really dropped the ball with this. 244t much better for photo, DVD viewing, web design, same panel but better de-lacing and better DVI electronics.Updated
5. also it stretches 1600x1200 games to 1920x1200, grays out 4:3 and 1:1 option, so if your gfx card does not have center or aspect ratio features (such as most ATI), you are out of luck.
6. it forget most settings in the OSD, so you constantly need to wade through menu and reset stuffUpdated
ok, now Dell says that they do drive the 8bit panle as 8bit (which make sense). however, fact is it still bands and something is wrong.
- 2 replies to this review
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My monitor was stretching out the games, and I was being driven up the wall because the aspect ratio changes were being greyed on the on-screen menu. However, I am pretty sure that it was greying them out because the graphics card was formatting the overlay itself. Anyways if you have an nVidia card, grab the newest drivers and then go to the "NVIDIA Control Panel" in the Windows Control panel. Click on "Display" then select "change flat panel scaling". Here you can tell it what to do, or you can enable no scaling and do it through the monitor menu. Good luck
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Here is the link:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/26/dell-fesses-up-to-2007wfp-banding-problems/
Quote from article:
"Dell looked into the issue, found the problem to be pretty rare, and caused by the monitor's active color management chip which switches between desktop, multimedia and gaming modes....Dell has now updated the firmware to disable this mode"
