Dell E248WFP 24" LCD: Full HD Goodness For All!

Here's an off-the-cuff review, don't expect anything in-depth or professional. Plus, I don't have a decent digital camera to post pics, other owners on TE have done or can do that.

Update: ShakenSoul has posted pics and comments in post #10 below. Also check his post in the show-off section at Yeh Dil Maange More

So here goes:

Initial Impression:

First off, this is replacing a 3 year old 17" LG LCD, and the size of this monster has blown me away I intentionally controlled the urge to upgrade to a 19 or 22 incher, eyeing and waiting almost a year to get this model!

Unboxing:

When I got my hands on the package it was surprisingly lightweight and for a while I was thinking I got an empty box! The LCD is very light for it's size.

I gingerly unpacked the thing, clipped on the stand and hooked it up to my PC and took down the brightness/contrast to 50% each, colour RGB I left at 100% each. My eyes almost popped outta their sockets coz the screen looks so huge and wide to me.

Testing 1, 2, 3:

My first and foremost concern with nearly 2.2 megapixels on this thing: I spent a few minutes looking for dead/stuck pixels by running the default WinXP screensaver (mostly black background) and also loading up a full-screen all-white image, don't see any right now

Update: I've had this LCD powered on now for the whole day without any screensaver/DPMS power-off enabled and I don't see any heat issues if I place my hands over the vents at the back.

Screen fill modes:

Next, I quickly tested the various screen fill modes, "1:1", "4:3", "16:9" and the default "Fill". I prefer to keep it at the 1:1 setting for now in case I need lower resolutions.

Video/Graphics:

Then, I fired up MPlayer and loaded up, what else, "Elephants Dream" And it is OMFG OMFG GORGEOUS FULL HD GOODNESS!

My poor old P4 2.4 can't seem to handle the other 1080p clips I have like the Beowulf and Indiana Jones 4 trailers, heh. So I am waiting to upgrade my desktop before I can try any games at WUXGA (1920x1200) resolution. But I expect games (and certainly videos) will look super on this LCD.

Update: I just booted into Ubuntu and ran the GLGears and Planetary Gears fast-ish moving screensavers and the edges of the gears appeared (casual visual inspection) sharp and ghosting-free to me.

Update: Downloaded the trial versions of PassMark MonitorTest and DisplayMate and ran their tests, all look okay to me. There was this horizontal sliding/moving squares test in PassMark where the vertical edges of the squares were uneve (tearing?) but I believe this is due to my graphics card and the lack of double/triple buffering.

Caution:

Now, before you all go rushing out to buy one of these for yourselves, let me caution you on a few potential let-downs, even though these don't bother me:

This is a TN panel, and you can clearly see the colour/brightness shifts if you move your head around, although it's very minor, IMHO. Being a TN panel makes it much more affordable compared to the IPS/PVA panels which are mostly popular with the likes of picky/choosy graphic designers and the sort that need better (near-CRT) colour/image quality.

The upper half of the screen is a bit dimmer than the lower half and I have to keep the screen near vertical (and kinda "looking down" at it a bit) to minimise that.

Update: Looks like I get best results if I place my face about 1.5 feet in front and center of the screen, but there's no hard and fast need for me to do it.

Backlight bleed:

Also, there is a little backlight bleed all over the screen, but I'm right now sitting at 1am with dim CFL lighting in my room, so I don't expect it to be a problem during the daytime.

Note that these issues are noticeable mostly while just browsing or working on documents and stuff like that, but like I wrote above, watching videos (and I expect games too) the display is very good IMHO.

Update: The backlight bleed is barely noticeable at all during the daytime. I have also set the RGB levels to 100 each, brightness to 10 and contrast to 45 to make viewing a Word doc seem similar to looking at a real printed paper doc

Suggestion:

If you're accustomed to an IPS or PVA panel (Dell UltraSharp kinda model) then I would suggest you stay away from this and get the UltraSharp 2408 PVA panel or something like that if you want Full HD yourself

Summary:

I personally already like this monitor a lot, especially since I've been staring at a 17" TN panel for the last 3 yrs Now my office 17 incher will look really puny on Monday I'm sure.

FULL HD GOODNESS FTW!

Update: Here is a review where the BenQ G2400W just beats out a Dell E248WFP See The Amazing HD Gaming Monitor Shootout! . Both LCDs can be gotten from the "Hot Deals" section in this forum!