Originally posted by: koitsu
News for those following this thread, and my comments:
My replacement arrived today (I still have to figure out how to get the old one back to Dell, supposedly there was an airbill shipped with it, or something along those lines, for the return -- no such thing found anywhere. Doh!), and I took the liberty of disconnecting my 2005FPW and therefore putting two 2405FPWs side-by-side for comparison.
Since my video card doesn't do dual DVI (just DVI + VGA d-sub), I stuck one on each port. In this case, the replacement on the VGA, and the one I had problems with on the DVI. I also reset the monitors to Factory Defaults, and additionally (on the VGA display only) chose "Auto Adjust" in the Image Settings menu (needed to detect better phase).
Sadly, I found that both monitors looked exactly the same in quality; same issues: white looking creme-coloured, sharpness looking like that of a CRT (I don't care what people say, CRTs always have some weird-looking pixel phase problems which make fonts look blurry), and so on. In fact, the replacement had a lit pixel to boot. Doh!
I started thinking about what everyone here said, re: their 2405FPWs being absolutely gorgeous, fantastic sharpness, etc.. I myself have really bad eyes (nearsighted), so I knew it wasn't just a personal preference, since chances are people with better eyes than mine are the ones who're telling me "there's something wrong with your setup because ours here looks great". Chances were, something WAS wrong with my setup, especially with two monitors doing the same thing. I decided to run through the procedure again, re-connecting cables and all that.
The only thing I found was that for DVI, I was using the DVI cable that came with my 2005FPW -- NOT the DVI cable that came with the 2405FPWs. I assumed they were identical.
I swapped the 2005FPW DVI cable for one of the cables which came with the 2405FPWs.
SURPRISE! Everything now looks *AMAZINGLY* crisp (as someone mentioned, literally on par with the 2005FPW), and the "yellow white" has decreased in intensive severely (my guess is that I can get rid of it entirely adjusting the colour settings in the OSD (which I had to do on my 2005FPW too, but on that because everything was too bright, haha).
I moved the DVI cable over to the other 2405FPW (the first one I received), and voila, just as sharp + beautiful.
Prognosis: the DVI cable that comes with the 2005FPW might not be able to handle the higher frequency/bandwidth of a 1920x1200 monitor. I thought it might be noise or shielding related, but here's the kicker: the DVI cable for my 2005FPW is almost 2x as thick as the one for my 2405FPW, implying more shielding for the 2005FPW. I'm not sure what to think of that, but hey, whatever.
The replacement I received from Dell will be going back to them (rather than sending them back the original unit they sent me; I'll have to talk to support about this, since they asked for and check serial numbers, which obviously won't match), since it has a lit pixel. No sense in keeping the one with a lit pixel defect when the other one is perfect, heh.
Moral of the story: user error (as it usually is). I take full responsibility for my claims being false, but somewhat justified under the circumstances.
Consider it educational for future users: if you're using DVI and "upgrading" to a 2405FPW, be sure to swap your DVI cable out for the one that comes with your new monitor. It DOES matter!
Thanks everyone for putting up with me. ;-)
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