Dell 2405FPW

I´m thinking about buying this ...
Does anyone has experience of this widescreen monitor?

/ Lednam

Not yet, but I ordered one at the end of March and yesterday and today UPS has been trying to deliver it to me while I wasn't home! I hope to have it on my desk within the next few days.......

I also have one on order. They're quite hard to get hold of at the moment, everyone's running out of stock due to very high demand. I'll post a review after I get a reasonable level of experience with it.

Yes !!!! I got a call from UPS earlier today, they told me I could collect my 2405FPW at the UPS center this evening. Right now it's on my desk!

What can I say.... it's a great monitor: very large display surface, it works great at 1920 x 1200 (icons and text are not too small and lots of room for Photoshop), no dead or hot (sub)pixels, the colours look great, it's very sharp.

I haven't yet set it up properly, but by default the screen is very bright - after looking at it for a few hours, I can feel my eyes are getting tired. I also haven't tried to calibrate and profile it yet - I will try that tomorrow with my Spyder.

It's a great monitor!!!

I have one. I LOVE it. It's so much better than the 19" CRT it replaced. 1000:1 contrast is very awesome.

Thanks to everyone! Has someone compared the analog and digital signals? Dark grey and light grey seems to give different performance on some LCD monitors.

/ Lednam

With LCD monitors it's always better to use the digital connection (DVI) instead of the analog (D-Sub) connection. If your video card doesn't have DVI, go to the shop and get a new video card...

I bought a new video card with ATi Radeon 9600 chip for my new monitor.

I've now calibrated and profiled my 2405FPW with my Spyder. It was easy to do and the colours look great - in fact, better than on my old Sony Multiscan E400 CRT monitor - but that one is already 5 years old, so it could be starting to fade.

Quick question Jesper (or anyone): How difficult is it to replace the graphics card? Just a "plug and play"? Or is it more complex? Thanks.

if you've ever installed/replaced any card in your computer (like a sound card) then your video card is the same thing. if you havent, its very easy. just unplug your computer (very important), carefully pull out your old card (it takes some effort to pull it out), and then put in your new one (you have to push very hard so be careful). if youre using the same brand of video card (like nvida or ati) you probably wont need to install new drivers. but if its different, you should download and install the proper drivers.

Have the 20 inch widescreen - very impress.

Video card installation - read the instructions first. Sometimes it's hardware before software then others it's software before hardware. When I do video card installations, before I remove the old card, I go into device manager and delete the card you are taken out unless you are leaving it in for dual screen. It's easier then you think.

FYI: Some systems have onboard video cards and also an AGP port. If you use the AGP port, it disables the onboard video so you can't have dual displays. You get by this by installing a PCI card. Just check your system to see which port it supports.

Hope that didn't confuse you.

P.S. - some people say to leave the computer plug in but not on, this will make the computer have a ground. - After 8 years, I only blow 1 logic board, it was on a printer.

Quote from an review of Dell Ultrasharp 2001FP
"On our tests using DisplayMate images (www.displaymate.com), the 2001FP had excellent dark gray and very good light gray response with good color tracking on analog signals. With a digital signal, dark gray performance was weak while light gray performance was excellent. "

http://www.pcmag.com …le2/0,1759,1770​299,00.asp

Jesper,how good is the grayscale after calibration? I´m also interested in experiences of an calibrated 2001FP.

/ Lednam

Not difficult - unplug and open up the computer, take out the graphics card, insert the new graphics card and plug the computer in again. Even if you've never opened up your computer before it's not too difficult, but if you're not sure just find a local computer guru in your neighbourhood to do it for you... Ofcourse you have to make sure you buy the right kind of video card, there are cards different interfaces (several types of AGP, PCI Express, etc.) and you should also take care that you get a card that can handle the high 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution of the screen.

If you have Windows XP, it will install the appropriate video driver by itself, and you'll probably also get a CD and hardware / software installation instructions with the new video card.

I have an older computer myself with an AGP 2.0 video slot, so I got the Sapphire Atlantis 9600 Pro, which has an ATi Radeon 9600 graphics chip on it. I wanted to buy a cheaper one (although this one wasn't really expensive either), but I found out that the cheaper ATi chips (Radeon 9200, 9250) can't handle more than about 1600 x 1200 pixels.

I'm not sure how to judge the grayscale - the DisplayMate program that they've used in that test is not free and I'm not going to buy it for just a simple check... Do you have a test image somewhere that you want me to say something about - for example compare between my CRT and the 2405FPW?

I noticed that before calibration, darker colours where quite light, but after calibrating, the contrast / gray level steps look exactly right, just like before on my CRT screen - and on this new LCD, the colours look even better than on my CRT.

I found some here: http://netmediazone.ne​t/b4/html/test_signal.​html

/ Lednam

lednam wrote:
I found some here: http://netmediazone.ne​t/b4/html/test_signal.​html

OK. When I look at the image with the grey patches (Fine Dot / Moire / Grayscale), I see this: There is no moire pattern at all in the background. With the dark gray patches, the darkest one that I can see that differs from the background is the "8". The "4" is too dark and looks like black, unless I look at the screen from the side. With the light gray patches, even the lightest one ("251") is quite clearly distinct from pure white. In the "Color Spectrum" image I can see 20 distinct levels for all the colors, although for each one the leftmost one is completely black.