My new Dell 2405FPW - pictures & first impressions

[Baddass]

Well, I'm the proud new owner of a shiney new Dell 2405FPW courtesy of OcUK!:



Thought i'd share a few first impressions about the monitor really. There will be an in depth review coming soon, after i have had chance to test it fully and get over the 'new toy' aspect of it. Here is a good place for anyone to ask questions about what they would like to know about this TFT. I will try and include all the info on my review which will get posted on OcUK and at TFTCentral.co.uk too in the near future.


Anyway, first impressions:

- Man, this screen is HUGE! Seriously you cant belive just how massive it is. Such a huge size increase from a 17" TFT. The resolution is excellent and the desktop real estate is great!


Multi tasking on one screen

- Image is colourful, crisp (although I'm on VGA at the moment due to limitations of my graphics card's DVI output)
- Screen functionality is great, the connectivity for cards, USB, video inputs is very nice, and the pivot function is handy and smooth to operate
- Pivoting the monitor into portrait is probably a bit extreme on this size screen as it is just so huge, i prefer to work with two screens side by side, using half the panel each


Pivoted monitor in portrait mode

- NVidia's software is nice to allow you to maximise the screen to certain gridline


UPDATE!

Movies:

Well. I've had chance to play a few movies and TV shows on this screen adn i have to say, the size of it really comes into it's own here. If you're watching the movies up close, there is some noticable noise on large colour masses when using full screen, and this is only exentuated when watching compressed files such as those encoded in DivX / XVid. Having said that, there would be no reason to be watching them from that close in at full screen anyway. If you're watching it windowed then this noise is not really noticable, and the movies look like they would on a 17" model for instance. It's only when you make them full screen (and therefore a much higher res) that you can notice a bit of noise.

The screen is brilliant for movies though. The WS is very nice here, removes a lot of the borders from the movies/shows. Viewing angles are very good and this helps too. The image is sharp and very colourful and i would certainly say it is a very nice experience watching movies on this screen


Colours

After a bit of fiddling with the settings i managed to get this looking very nice indeed. Black depth is very good and this is perhaps one of the most noticable improvements over TN Film panels which i have seen in action. Blacks in movies for instance, are actualyl black, and not dark grey. More to follow in full review at a later date....


Gaming

I've tried GTA San Andreas at full 1920 x 1200 res, and with the nice WS camera hack for it, it looks VERY nice indeed. The screen is so huge it is really immersive. There is no obvious ghosting of the image that i can see, but this isn't a fast FPS or anything bare in mind. I have noticed a little white trailing behind the mouse in windows which appears to be related to overdrive, but is not the kind of thing you notice normally. You have to look very hard. I will be testing more games soon, and seeing whether there is any obvious ghosting, or blurring of textures.

 

[Baddass]

- Viewing angles are very good, a noticable difference to TN Film panels, especially in the vertical field


Vertical viewing angle, colours remain very good to pretty much 90 degrees


Horizontal viewing angles are very wide thanks to PVA technology


Cable tidy just allows the cables to be tucked up at the back like this:



Then there's a clip attached on the back where you just clip the cables in. That's it, does a good job. Don't forget to leave a bit of slack if you intend to rotate to portrait mode:

 

[Baddass]

More general pictures:

 

[Baddass]

really liking it so far, hard to get over the sheer size tho! before anyone says it as well, yes......i know, i need a new keyboard / mouse

 

[Baddass]

^^ I'd also like to know this. Is it in the software or did you simply manually re-size the windows?

REALLY easy to do. It's just an option in the software which allows you to assign gridlines to wherever you want. I have the screen split exactly down the middle. Then all you do is hold ALT when you maximise a window and it fills it to the grid! very handy, and works a treat

I also set hot key short cuts to get the Nvidia drivers to rotate the screen so when i move it to portrait i just hit a button and sorted!

 

[Baddass]

Sounds excellent!

So you have to go back into the sofware everytime you want to switch between viewing a window in the whole screen and in half/half to remove/add the grid line, or can you set a hotkey for that

Is that just in the Nvidia software, on ATI until tomorrow?

Also, how you set the hot key (sorry if I'm going at a tangent to the screen quality etc, I'll stop now!)

no not at all, dont worry. you go into the settings once and there's a really easy wizard to set gridlines. it gives you big green lines and you move them how you want. then thats it. You just use windows normally but when you want to maximise a window to the nearest grid section you just hold ALT when you press maximise! ive only got the scren divided in 2, so i open a window and you can just double click the bar at the top while holding ALT to make it fill the nearest section

there's another section to set hot keys for pretty much any of the graphics card options. so ive set one which is for the option in there to rotate the image. again, set it once and thats it. For instance CRTL +F11 on mine makes it rotate 90 degrees, and CRTL +F12 makes it go back to normal


thanks for the comments everyone

 

[Baddass]

omg

I didn't realise those watercoolers were that big

err.. I mean wow nice monitor hehe looks well nice, is that a coldcathode under the edge of the desk?

Hmm maybe I should've bought one. Wasn't so sure for the gaming and ghosting possibility tho

yeah, my Reserator is sat their, does a good job, and yeah, it's pretty massive! that was a shock when i opened that from the post, but nothing like this TFT! tis a monster!

just some blue cathodes under desk, looks quite good at night time with them all lit up

 

[Baddass]

no, there is DVI on the card but because it's a GeForce 4 ti4200 the DVI can only support 1600 x 1200 resolution! this thing is just too much of a beast for that!

 

[Baddass]

graphics card tab > desktop management section (might need to "enable desktop management") > user interface section > edit gridlines button

 

[Baddass]

well perhaps OcUK will do another T.W.O only offer, we can onyl hope

 

[Baddass]

yes

 

[Baddass]

you don't really need two kidneys do you

 

[Baddass]

yeah, thanks for that background mate looks good, need to have a look round for some new ones soon

 

[Baddass]

That's a lie! I'm using 1920 x 1200 on my GF4 Ti4200. It's a Gainward one, but it shouldn't make any difference.

you sir are a legend! i admit i had never actually tried it, but when i ordered the monitor before i got it i checked every linked spec i could find for the card and it said DVI upt o 1600 x 1200 and i assumed it wouldnt support this res. running happily now on DVI-D!! lovely, looks even sweeter now than it did before, very happy!

 

[Baddass]

this is some kind of magical card!! im very surprised it does this res on DVI and even more surprised games like GTA San Andreas run at 1920 x 1200 and full draw distance without a problem!

 

[Baddass]

Baddass, can you take a pic of how you've tidied your cables as mine look a bit of a mess.

will sort out some pics of the cables this evening. Do you mean the ones for the TFT or inside my case?

Toekiller, that's Samurize running in the top left, shows CPU usage, mem usage, network traffic and temps. handy to have i find

 

[Baddass]

Nice pics, Baddass awesome review, you have me thining of getting one

How does it scale to 1280x1024 in games?

not had chance to have a proper play yet. don't worry, a more in depth review will be following soon. I'll see if i can add a bit of content soon to the front of this thread though

 

[Baddass]

let us know how you find it Latte Personally i was looking for a PC solution, but there are certainly some very nice large HDTV LCD TV's around too

 

[Baddass]

added some first impressions about gaming, movies and colour reproduction to the front page of this thread.

There will be a full review coming in the next few weeks with much more info and more pics

 

[Baddass]

Of the cable tidy pls!!

sorry mate, had to find my camera again.

Right, cable tidy just allows the cables to be tucked up at the back like this:



Then there's a clip attached on the back where you just clip the cables in. That's it, does a good job. Don't forget to leave a bit of slack if you intend to rotate to portrait mode: