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Its
looks are highly subjective, of course; but
as far as I am concerned, it's a very good looking
monitor, which looks very professional in any
desktop. As we previously stated, the panel
is not square, but wide, with the Dell offering
a native resolution of 1920x1200 (a 16:10 ratio).
The panel can be rotated, as you would expect,
so that you get a perfect mode for working with
large documents. To be honest I haven't used
this feature all these months, but it's cool
to have nevertheless, and I am certain some
will use it anyway. An additional bonus –
which I haven't used as well so far - is that
you can wall-mount the panel too, since Dell
has given it the ability to come off of its
base. That means that you can easily attach
it to any VESA wall-mount bracket. The pixel
response times listed are both 12ms (for grey
to grey) and 16ms (for black to white). Dell
added more value to the monitor, by including
some extras, like a 4-port USB hub (with two
ports on the side of the display and two on
the main connector panel) and a 6-in-1 USB card
reader in the side of the display, which supports
Smart Media, Sony Memory Stick/MS Pro, SD and
Mini-SD, CompactFlash (type I and II) and Hitachi
Microdrive. I can assure you that these will
prove extremely handy; I am using the extra
USB ports in my panel to connect my mouse, joypad
and my 20GB USB disk, which I use to transfer
stuff between houses. As for the card reader,
if you have either a cellular phone that accepts
those or a camera, you will tend to use these
facilities often. |
As
far as connectivity options are concerned, the
2405fpw does not disappoint, with VGA, DVI,
composite, component, and S-video connections
being the norm. We should probably note that
the DVI input does not support HDCP content
protection, so this may pose a problem in the
future for HDTV sources that require HDCP. A
very interesting and useful feature is PiP (Picture
In Picture),
which works with all inputs. What it does, essentially,
is allow you to have a small window in the upper
right corner (or a side by side window), which
will display an alternate input than the primary
one. This works surprisingly well, for instance
you can connect the DVI port to your PC, and
the composite input to another source, and have
the two displays side by side. The
OSD is fairly typical for most TFT monitors,
and allows you to manage most settings.
What we noticed, is that depending on the source
you use, the panel will let you change a different
set of settings. For instance, if you use the
VGA input, you are able to change both brightness
and contrast from the OSD, but if you use the
DVI input, only brightness is accessible. This
has the side-effect that, if you want to change
things, you have to rely on your graphics driver
to do it. Fortunately, both ATI and nVidia have
very proficient control panels nowadays, so
that doesn't pose as a major drawback –
just make sure you have the latest drivers downloaded,
just in case. |
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