- Jan 18, 2001
- 4,849
- 1
- 81
Maetryx here, 
Yesterday my brand new Dell 2405FPW arrived. The package weighed about 29 lbs. It was apparently shipped from a Portland, Oregon warehouse, so it only took about a day to get to me once they shipped it. Obviously, YMMV. The website originally told me that I could expect to receive the monitor on October 7th, so I was pleasantly surprised to find myself opening the package on September 28th.
Let's face it. I was more than pleasantly surprised. I had wood. I will be giving Dell glowing praise to resellerratings and bizrate.
My outgoing monitor is a Samsung 193P 19" 4:3 LCD, so I was acclimatized to LCD goodness and Samsung's unbeatable 1000:1 contrast ratio. I was also accustomed to forgiving my Samsung for a not quite fast enough refresh rate for dark 3D games. It wasn't bad, but it was certainly noticeable, especially when a dark object moved across the screen over a light background (duh).
On of the first thing I loved about the Dell: The monitor pivots on the stands in the horizontal plane, i.e. I can turn the panel (say, toward my wife across the room so she can see something ineresting) without turning the base. The Samsung doesn't do this. I had to physically rotate the base on my desk to face it another direction.
But, of coure, the FIRST think I loved about the Dell is that it is monstrously huge. I mean, you remember when there used to be megabytes for hard drives and now they're measured in gigabytes (and probably terabytes real soon)? This monitor is two feet wide. Maybe in the future monitors will be measured in feet instead of inches. This will be the turning point if that ever occurs.
"Hey, Bob, have you seen the new 2.0 feet monitor from Dell? It used to be called the 2405FPW, and now they call it 205FPW. "
This monitor made me feel like a halfling (a D&D hobbit). In fact, it was actually strange at first how *much* I had to turn my head to look from one part of the screen to the other. My neck hasn't had this much exercise since Def Leppard released "Hysteria" in 1987 and I learned to headbang. I actually had to increase the mouse sensitivity so that I didn't have to go through three separate mouse strokes to get from one edge of the screen to the other.
I fired up several games to see how they felt. GTA:III, Diablo II, The Sims 2... I was using older games because 1) I don't have a lot of newer games right now and 2) some of the newer ones I do run require the CD... and some of my stuff is still packed from a recent move *and* 3) there is no way my soon-to-be-replaced computer could pump the pixels of a recent game at the native resolution of 1920x1200.
1920x1200. *Feints*.
Quick impressions, because I'm running out of time to write this review:
1) Diablo II: your face really is only about 4 pixels. The game is limited to 800x600. It stretches it horizontally and have not yet figured out if there is a way to put black bars on the side instead. My Paladin was HUGE on the screen. Pretty cool.
2) GTA:III: Brilliant! The city came alive as it nearly filled my peripheral vision. Again, main characters in 3rd person perspective games like this and Diablo II are giant on your screen (until you get used to it).
3) The Sims 2: This game actually benefited the most, I think. You can stay zoomed out to see the majority of the house, and yet the monitor is so big that you're not losing any detail to "distance". Or you can zoom right up the sims nostrils. It was fabulous. I actually wanted to play this game more, even though I hadn't touched it for months.
Finally, I had to watch a DVD. My wife said I had to use The Cell (2000, Lopez, D'Onofrio). I ran it with Cyberlink's PowerDVD. I discovered something I wasn't prepared to discover. DVDs are very low resolution. There, I said it. 480P is inadequate to fill the vast reaches of a 2 foot monitor capable of 1920x1200. I mean, I *knew* in theory that 480P was an aging video format, but now I know it in practice. It was still pretty awesome to watch it on my monitor.
The ONE thing that is a knock against the monitor (and it's possible I just haven't found the setting to fix it): the black levels are not very black. LCDs are prone to having a kind of light gray version of black, and my computer is in a darker room of the house. So the "black" bars surrounding the full screen movie (The Cell is wider than 1.85, so it has black bars above and below) were annoyingly light gray.
edit: Okay, I found out how to turn down the brightness and it is a lot better.
If I find a setting that corrects this or improves it, I'll let everyone know. It's obviously not the end of the world.
Did I mention that the monitor accepts DVI, VGA, S-Video, Component and has a built in USB hub? That it does picture in picture (PnP) from any two video sources?
My verdict: 9/10 and could be 10/10 if I figure out how to turn down the brightnesss on the darn thing! I'm not used to the menus yet, which aren't the easiest to navigate and I flat ran out of time on a work night to mess with it any more.
BTW, combining varoius Hot Deal options, I got the monitor for about $860 shipped. Others have done better.
edit-->changed 16:9 to 16:10... thanks SynthDude2001!
Yesterday my brand new Dell 2405FPW arrived. The package weighed about 29 lbs. It was apparently shipped from a Portland, Oregon warehouse, so it only took about a day to get to me once they shipped it. Obviously, YMMV. The website originally told me that I could expect to receive the monitor on October 7th, so I was pleasantly surprised to find myself opening the package on September 28th.
Let's face it. I was more than pleasantly surprised. I had wood. I will be giving Dell glowing praise to resellerratings and bizrate.
My outgoing monitor is a Samsung 193P 19" 4:3 LCD, so I was acclimatized to LCD goodness and Samsung's unbeatable 1000:1 contrast ratio. I was also accustomed to forgiving my Samsung for a not quite fast enough refresh rate for dark 3D games. It wasn't bad, but it was certainly noticeable, especially when a dark object moved across the screen over a light background (duh).
On of the first thing I loved about the Dell: The monitor pivots on the stands in the horizontal plane, i.e. I can turn the panel (say, toward my wife across the room so she can see something ineresting) without turning the base. The Samsung doesn't do this. I had to physically rotate the base on my desk to face it another direction.
But, of coure, the FIRST think I loved about the Dell is that it is monstrously huge. I mean, you remember when there used to be megabytes for hard drives and now they're measured in gigabytes (and probably terabytes real soon)? This monitor is two feet wide. Maybe in the future monitors will be measured in feet instead of inches. This will be the turning point if that ever occurs.
"Hey, Bob, have you seen the new 2.0 feet monitor from Dell? It used to be called the 2405FPW, and now they call it 205FPW. "
This monitor made me feel like a halfling (a D&D hobbit). In fact, it was actually strange at first how *much* I had to turn my head to look from one part of the screen to the other. My neck hasn't had this much exercise since Def Leppard released "Hysteria" in 1987 and I learned to headbang. I actually had to increase the mouse sensitivity so that I didn't have to go through three separate mouse strokes to get from one edge of the screen to the other.
I fired up several games to see how they felt. GTA:III, Diablo II, The Sims 2... I was using older games because 1) I don't have a lot of newer games right now and 2) some of the newer ones I do run require the CD... and some of my stuff is still packed from a recent move *and* 3) there is no way my soon-to-be-replaced computer could pump the pixels of a recent game at the native resolution of 1920x1200.
1920x1200. *Feints*.
Quick impressions, because I'm running out of time to write this review:
1) Diablo II: your face really is only about 4 pixels. The game is limited to 800x600. It stretches it horizontally and have not yet figured out if there is a way to put black bars on the side instead. My Paladin was HUGE on the screen. Pretty cool.
2) GTA:III: Brilliant! The city came alive as it nearly filled my peripheral vision. Again, main characters in 3rd person perspective games like this and Diablo II are giant on your screen (until you get used to it).
3) The Sims 2: This game actually benefited the most, I think. You can stay zoomed out to see the majority of the house, and yet the monitor is so big that you're not losing any detail to "distance". Or you can zoom right up the sims nostrils. It was fabulous. I actually wanted to play this game more, even though I hadn't touched it for months.
Finally, I had to watch a DVD. My wife said I had to use The Cell (2000, Lopez, D'Onofrio). I ran it with Cyberlink's PowerDVD. I discovered something I wasn't prepared to discover. DVDs are very low resolution. There, I said it. 480P is inadequate to fill the vast reaches of a 2 foot monitor capable of 1920x1200. I mean, I *knew* in theory that 480P was an aging video format, but now I know it in practice. It was still pretty awesome to watch it on my monitor.
The ONE thing that is a knock against the monitor (and it's possible I just haven't found the setting to fix it): the black levels are not very black. LCDs are prone to having a kind of light gray version of black, and my computer is in a darker room of the house. So the "black" bars surrounding the full screen movie (The Cell is wider than 1.85, so it has black bars above and below) were annoyingly light gray.
edit: Okay, I found out how to turn down the brightness and it is a lot better.
If I find a setting that corrects this or improves it, I'll let everyone know. It's obviously not the end of the world.
Did I mention that the monitor accepts DVI, VGA, S-Video, Component and has a built in USB hub? That it does picture in picture (PnP) from any two video sources?
My verdict: 9/10 and could be 10/10 if I figure out how to turn down the brightnesss on the darn thing! I'm not used to the menus yet, which aren't the easiest to navigate and I flat ran out of time on a work night to mess with it any more.
BTW, combining varoius Hot Deal options, I got the monitor for about $860 shipped. Others have done better.
edit-->changed 16:9 to 16:10... thanks SynthDude2001!
Facebook
Twitter