Saturday, February 10, 2007

Dell 2407FPW 24" HD Monitor Review (Revision A03)

I just received a 24" 2407WFP Dell Monitor (Revision A03). So, I thought I would tell you about my first week's impressions of this fine monitor.

When I first opened up the box. It was impressed the 2407WFP had the following Digital Ports:
DVD-D, VGA, Component, S-Video and Composite. This is really nice if you plan on hooking up a set top box, game system, or an external digital video camera/camcorder.

I read somewhere that this monitor is not a bright as a comparable Samsung monitor. I work on computers all day, I when I first started using this monitor, the first thing I did was turn the brightness down from 50 to 25. At 50, the colors look really nice, but it was too much eye strain on me. When watching movies, I usually turn the brightness back up to 50 and for desktop work I use it at 25.

There is one strange thing that I noticed about the monitor. At certain brightnesses when moving a window around the screen in Mac OS X, there is sometimes a green, yellow or brown halo or trail. Adjusting the brightness in combination trying the PC Normal color setting instead of the Mac setting helps make it go away. I am not sure what exactly causes this as I have not seen it my other Dell Monitor, a 2001FP on the system. Luckily the monitor can be adjusted to minimize or remove the colored ghost trails altogether.

I purchased a separate speaker bar for the 2407WFP. It works fantastic and the monitor comes with it own power for the speaker bar. I recommended anyone who buys a dell monitor especially the 2007WFP, 2407WFP, or the older 2405WFP and 2001FP models to purchase the optional $30 speaker bar.

The 24" is an HD monitor. So I thought I would download some 720p and 1080p movie trailers. The first own I tried playing was Shrek the Third. My computer stutters when trying to play 1080p movies, so I will just talk about the image quality and detail. It was outstanding. Very clear picture. Image detail was superb. Textures such as wood and pores in a characters face comes out really nice. There was also no banding between colors. I rank this monitor pretty high for its HD quality. I also tried 720p movies on my computer and these looked almost as good as the 1080p versions and the picture and frames produced very smooth playback. Playing regular DVDs worked good too. This monitor does a good just sampling up 480p to 1080p to full screen. While your are not going to get HD quality detail, DVDs do not look blurred or pixilated. iTunes movies look almost at good as a DVD. Some pixillation was noticable due to the movies being 360p widescreen as for the type of compression that Apple Inc. uses. Overall for watching HD and DVD movies, I give this screen a thumbs up. Now if you have a big room, I would recommended getting a 27" or 30" screen if you can afford it. 24" is good for watching movies in a small room or office, but it's going to be your big screen TV, but for me this is all I could afford, it is my personal HDTV. The monitor is HDCP compliant, so if you have an HDCP compatible Video card and OS, you will be able to watch HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies, provided your have an HD-DVD/Blu-Ray software player and hardware.

I did some photoshop work and with the HD quality screen at 1920 x 1050 using the Photoshop 3 beta, there is plenty of room for workspace and pallets. Websurfing is also really nice, you can have 2-3 webpages side by side. For technical writing, you can have a window for research material and another for your word processor or blogging software. The monitor is very wide, so the corners of the screen appear slightly distorted. It's not the monitor, its our eyes. I think one day if these monitors get any bigger, we are going to need to have a curved 180 degree screen, so anywhere that you look on the monitor it appears to have the same point of view. The 2407FPW, does swivel left and right and tilt it up and down. You can move the monitor just about any way want to suite your viewing needs.

Other than the ghost trails that can be fixed by adjusting the monitor, I don't have anything bad to say about this screen. One other thing it could use is a dedicated button for brightness. But the controls are not terribly hard to use. It is sometimes hard to tell which item is highlighted in the color settings area. If you don't have an HDTV but would like HD quality on your desktop or game system, this monitor is for you. For Video editing, watching movies, using Photoshop, Web Surfing, this is an all around great monitor to have sitting on your desk.

I give it 4.5 of 5 stars.

Pros: Smooth Gradients, HD Quality 1920x1050, Built in Media Card Reader, USB 2.0 4-port hub, nice sunken buttons on the monitor. Comes with ICM profile on CD.
Cons: Ghost trails are possible, missing dedicated physical buttons for lowering and raising the brightness, sometimes it is hard to tell which option for adjusting the color mode.

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