 Great deal from other places |
| Review Date: February 10, 2009 |
| Reviewer: John S, |
| This is a great monitor for a different price - I won't go into other resellers, but Dell sells these for well below $500. A USB hub inside the monitor is not really necessary, and trust me, speakers on a monitor is an awful idea - audio pass through is much more useful. While you get less pixels than a 16:10 1080p monitor, 16:9 lets you do things like hook up a PS3 or Xbox 360 more easily. |
Great monitor for the price.
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| Review Date: October 21, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Mr. Married, Huntington Beach, CA |
When purchasing this monitor please keep in mind a few things:
1)This is a 24" LCD for people on a budget.
2)It has an odd resolution for its size, 1920x1080 instead of the normal 1920x1200.
3)It has no adjustable height or the ability to swivel into landscape or portrait mode.
4)No built in speakers or USB ports.
If you can overlook these 4 things then you're getting a great monitor! Please keep in mind that I am not using this for high end photography or video editing, nor am I playing video games of any sort (I do not use the HDMI port). I'm connected via the DVI port and mainly use it to watch TV shows/movies, resize a few photos here and there, web surfing, and can easily say everything looks gorgeous! You'll definitely have to adjust the brightness and contrast when you first receive it, it's set unnaturally bright, but for the amount I paid this is a great addition for my computer. One of the key things I really like about this monitor is how quickly it goes from standby mode to turning on.
Pictures are crisp/colorful and video looks superb. One thing to be very aware of, I'm not sure why Dell decided to do this, but the plastic material used to frame the front of the monitor is extremely glossy and EASILY scratched. In addition it picks up dust like mad, I would highly recommend you get a 3M microfiber cloth or a good soft duster to wipe off the frame. I made the mistake of using a normal cloth and now have scratches lining the top and side of my new monitor. :( If they had just stayed with the normal matte black this wouldn't be an issue, but I guess they're trying to go for an upscale look.
As I've only had this monitor for a week I will update my review again later on with any further issues/problems I may encounter. But I like what I see so far.
Cheers. |
Kind of wish I had waited
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| Review Date: January 25, 2009 |
| Reviewer: WorknMan, Austin, TX United States |
I was in the market for a monitor about this size with a native 1080p resolution, since I wanted to play games on my Xbox 360 via the HDMI port, plus I watch a lot of movies on my PC too.
First, the negatives:
- Text doesn't look as crisp as the 22" Samsung LCD I own (225 BW). Small fonts are particularly problematic, as they have a blue/gold tint around them. I have not been able to work around this issue by adjusting the settings. Note that I only run the monitor in its native 1080 resolution while watching movies, so that might have something to do with it.
- No height adjustment. This doesn't bother me as much as I thought it might, but get your phone books ready just in case :)
- This monitor has an audio out port which is supposed to allow you to output sound from any device plugged into the HDMI port. However, if there's no sound for about 5 seconds, this port 'goes to sleep' and takes around 10-15 seconds to wake back up once there is sound again. I saw numerous reports of this on the AVSForums and knew about it going in, so I was prepared for it. I had hoped that Dell would have fixed this by now on the latest revisions of the monitor, but it's still there.
All that said, games on the 360 look really amazing :) Plus, the screen is wider so you have a little more room when working with apps that have a lot of dockable windows/toolbars, such as Visual Studio.
I had a chance to compare DVDs with Blu-rays on this monitor (via my PC's BD-ROM drive), and can report that Blu-rays definitely look clearer on this monitor. However, the difference is not so drastic that I'm ready to throw away my DVD collection, plus I don't have a PS3 and Blu-ray on the PC is still too glitchy. (See my PowerDVD 8 review).
All in all, I like having a 1080 monitor, but wish I had waited just a bit longer for something a little better to come out. There are a couple of other 1080 monitors I know about (who's names escape me), but neither of them had the HDMI port I was looking for.
Oh, and if you decide to pony up for this monitor, keep in mind that Amazon is selling it for a ridiculously high price as of this writing. I got mine at a local Best Buy for less than 300 bones. Amazon may have lowered the price by the time you read this, but do some comparison shopping just in case! |
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