WTB Dell 22" Widescreen; need opinions/info

[zxchris8931]

Will my card work with this monitor? Its a pretty good price IMO and plus i have a 10% off coupon.

Dell 22" Widescreen

Do any of you own this monitor? Have owned?

edit : My card is a Radeon X800 XL. (i thought i put this in the original post, guess not)

By the reviews I dont think I should get it but just maybe they got some lemons Anywho, also I play some First-person shooters among other things such as WoW.

thanks for any help

 

[Zebo]

I have not seen it but most cards released last 3 years support 1680x1050.

 

[Shortass]

I have a feeling that the reviewers got the average monitor shipped to them, if not a better one. With the 2007wfp they all got pretty much the best of the stock and it went downhill from there... take it as about what you'll get. If you aren't terribly sensitive to backlight bleeding or don't care a ton about color continuity then it'll be a fine monitor. If it really bothers you I'd spend a little more and buy a better quality monitor. I'm sure most would be fine with it, if that counts for anything.

 

[Zebo]

Yea keep in mind this a TN and if you can deal with the downsides inherent to TN technology, such as the poor viewing angles, the poor colors, the back light bleed and never really truly blacks then go for it. $300 and cheaper for a 22" is hard to turn away from and Dell makes a nicer stand and Bezel than most.

 

[chizow]

Received this monitor yesterday, ordered on Tuesday I believe. The reviews and forum comments are pretty spot-on: inconsistent/inaccurate color reproduction, color banding/gradients on solid colors, poor viewing angles, backlight bleeding, etc. However, I still think its an incredible bargain for a 22" wide screen panel and I was shocked at how big it was in comparison to my trusty old 19" Dell Ultrasharp 1900FP.

This panel is BIG. It handles 3D games well, very little/no ghosting, image is sharp and colors are vibrant. Screen is bright overall and noticeably brighter than my aging 1900FP and E1505 Dell Inspiron laptop. 2D is also sharp with a ton of space to work with different windows and applications. The native resolution of 1680x1050 is also perfect for mid to upper range video cards for PC gaming, although with a panel this big it could stand for a slight increase in resolution. Obviously the trade-off would be worst performance as the higher resolution would be more taxing on the GPU. Movies look decent, but the poor black reproduction mentioned earlier really hurts this panel if you plan to use it a lot for movies.

Color accuracy seems a bit off and in 3D games, the bright colors seem too bright and the dark colors seem too dark. I could probably fix some of these problems with some graphics card control panel/OSD tweaking, but at this point I'm not going to bother to. Also, solid colors show some banding, like the top of the Window's bars have a gradient that shouldn't be there. The upper left has a small area, maybe 1/2" by 4", where the color reproduction of solid colors varies from pixel to pixel. The effect is a random pattern, where there should be none. There's also a good bit of backlight bleeding at the top of the LCD, which is again, only really noticeable on solid colors (not in 3D games). I didn't really notice too much at the bottom as some other comments had indicated.

Overall, I still think the monitor is an incredible bargain, however, there's one deal-breaking flaw which led me to the decision to send it back. There's a random flickering of the backlight that I thought only happened in 3D games (certain effects going off), but I also noticed it a few times while typing this up. Its as if you blinked or you had a light bulb in your room that was about to die. I could totally live with the other flaws of this panel considering its $300 price point, size and overall value, however, the flickering is something that I simply can't overlook.

It might be my particular monitor or perhaps the early revision A00, or even a symptom of a $300 22" wfp, but I'm not taking any chances. I was taken back by the size and brightness of the panel though, so there's no going back to my dull old 1900FP. I placed an order for the 24" 2407wfp (@630 shipped with 10% coupon) to replace this 22" which is going back to Dell. I'd advise anyone looking at this monitor to wait for a later revision or consider stepping it up to one of the higher quality (and higher priced) models instead.

 

[InFeXiOn]

If you don't plan to use the monitor a lot for movies, then I think it's great for games. I have this setup with a 32'' LCD TV for media purposes and for gaming on this E228WFP I've never seen the flickering thing you're talking about, and the colours look fine to me. How some people notice such small things is beyond me. Or maybe it's because this is my first LCD, aside from the TV I was using before via DVI-to-HDMI. For it's price though, there was no way I could justify $300+ for a mere 2 inches and the obvious differences between this and a 2407WFP, especially since I have a Dell W3201c 32'' TV for all of my console gaming and media needs. That's just my take on it, though.

 

[Zebo]

Hehe one LCD.. I've had about 20 and none I've been 100% happy with. Closest is a ridiculous $600 for only 20 inches.. You're right some peoples are more picky than others.. 95% will be perfectly happy with this monitor.

It's not "only two inches" Despite being pretty poor IMO also the 2407 also has way more pixels 19x12 giving more desktop real estate in 2d and higher details in 3d!! Plus it's blacks and colors are better being SPVA although I found color shifting with your head movement. Meh.

 

[InFeXiOn]

Yeah, I know the pixel differences and everything but for my purposes this monitor is wonderful, and for it's price it was hard to avoid.

By the way, how the hell do you have that 3800+ at 3Ghz? That's madness. I need to learn to overclock... I'm such a noob.

 

[chizow]

Ya, most people won't be too picky about the colors being a bit off and inconsistent across the panel. Its hard to see unless you've looked at other panels as a reference. For color reproduction, I have 2-3 other reference monitors/panels in close proximity so its easy to see the differences when running the same applications/games or viewing photos.

But like Zebo said, 95% of people (myself included) would be totally content with this panel, just the flickering was too much for me to overlook. Also curious if the 2407 you saw/owned was an earlier revision. I looked at some reviews and it seemed as if the earlier revisions/firmware had some problems, but were mostly corrected by now (they're on revision A03 I think now). I stopped by a Dell Kiosk to look at some of the different panels, but amazingly, they had neither the 22" or 24" there.....

But ya, 1680x1050 is about the minimum resolution you can run on a panel this big before 3D games start looking pixelated and grainy. Anything bigger starts to seriously tax your GPU to the point you need to start looking at SLI or running at non-native resolutions. I'd rather not have to deal with either option, and my 8800 GTS should be ok for now at 19x12, although making that jump in resolution is something I am a little worried about for future games.

 

[Zebo]

I cant personally comment on the 2407, 2405 is what I had uses same panel though and I don't like PVA period. All I've had looks milky to me in comparison to IPS or CRT at any angle off center... so much so one eye sees something different than another eye. The inherent problems with PVA are slowest response as it does'nt take overdrive well and has a more dynamic response curve at different colors than competing techs: going as low as 8ms but as high as 40ms causing serious motion blur IME. Good news is again many won't notice so.... The Dell 2407 in particular and perhaps other 24" PVA's from comments I've seen on them suffer from severe input lag. Input lag is a problem for all LCDs but worse with dells 2407. http://www.behardware.com/articles/632-...ages-delayed-compared-to-crts-yes.html I don't know if rev 03 corrects this? I doubt it since the problem seems inherent to PVA vs. the electronics inside.

All LCD's look great by themselves. Sharp text, bright, sexy etc.. just don't ever do an A/B test with a super high end IPS and pour over the details and you won't have my problem. Also no LCD is perfect. All have motion blur. All have input lag. All can't scale well. Lets hope you don't notice these things either.

-Still looking

InFeXiOn- I got two decent later date chips and put 1.60 volts to them and have water cooling. My 4200+ (i got early batch...first or second week) would'nt move past 2560Mhz. I also had a 165 opteron wouldnt move past 2600Mhz... So it's not all good I just jettisoned the poor clocking chips for ones that work.

Edit: one more thing about this 22" that could be a problem is it's huge pixel pitch of .282mm. Like a 19" ( .284mm) if you have good vision you will see the individual pixels which I find very disturbing especially on white back grounds I can see the Green and red pixels clearly.