My new Dell 2405FPW - pictures & first impressions

Baddass

Baddass

Baddass

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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.
 
- 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:

 
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 ;)
 
The Dell 2405FPW looks awesome but is far too expensive for me :(. However I see that the Samsung SM-913N 19" LCD Monitor is on special now. Just the excuss I needed to for out €320 euros for however I believe it will be worth it :)
 
That looks quality!

Still waiting for mine, meant to be here before 9!!

How long you had the monitor, noticed any dead pxels/squealing?
 
Brum Man said:
^^ I'd also like to know this. Is it in the software or did you simply manually re-size the windows?
Click to expand...


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! :D 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!
 
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 :p (sorry if I'm going at a tangent to the screen quality etc, I'll stop now!)
 
Brum Man said:
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 :p (sorry if I'm going at a tangent to the screen quality etc, I'll stop now!)
Click to expand...

Explore nView.
 
Brum Man said:
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 :p (sorry if I'm going at a tangent to the screen quality etc, I'll stop now!)
Click to expand...

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 said:
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! :D very handy, and works a treat :)
Click to expand...

Anyone know if there is anything similar for ATI cards??
 
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