Renzatic on 28/6/2009 at 02:37
Let it be said that anyone raised amongst tightwads ends up a spendthrift. And that's me. A Spendthrift. Straight up. No Doubt. Plain and simple. So today, just to prove it, I went and bought a new LCD monitor. Now I have two widescreens side by side (or I will, I'm still setting up my desk). My god, I am one spoiled son of a bitch.
So what did I get? One of these relatively new Dell 24'' 16:9 widescreens. 1080p so yay. Now that I've spent enough time getting my colors vibrant, my blacks black, and my whites white to the point where I have these huge blotches of color floating in my vision, I feel it's time to compare it to old faithful: The Gateway FPD2185W. Probably the best monitor I've ever owned.
First off, width and height. I've always been curious about the differences between the two standard widescreen ratios. Now I have the answers right in front of me.
So...the new monitor is a 24" 16:9, the old a 21" 16:10. In this upgrade, I gained absolutely nothing vertically. The new 24" might have...maybe...MAYBE...a centimeter advantage in height. I haven't broken out the rulers yet, but I'm gonna say they're about as close to 1:1 as you can get between two different brands of monitors. What I did gain though, is a whole shit ton to the right. Probably about a good 3rd of horizontal screen real estate (very rough estimation). For people who spend time reading and editing documents, this isn't necessarily a good thing. I have to scroll a little more on webpages, for example. But for people who goof around in Photoshop and 3D editors, the extra space is a massive boon. I no longer feel quite so cramped in Modo and Crazybump. I can stretch out interface elements and still have more real editing space than I did on the 16:10. And movies? Hulu is now full screen, and movies aren't letterboxed so severely. For me, going 16:9 is definitely a good thing.
Colorwise, this monitor is pretty decent...though not as good as the old Gateway. When I said it was the best monitor I've ever owned, I meant it. I've seen a ton of good mid-ranged LCDs, and only a handful have matched it. Fairly even backlight spread, great colors, great blacks. It's a damn great monitor all around. The new Dell actually comes short in comparison a little bit. While it's more vivid on the high end, it doesn't do darks quite as well. Nothing really worth bitching about, but I know you people are freaks about your Thief vidjagames. The Gateway does have one achilles heel: gradient banding, specially on blue channels. The Dell has absolutely no problems here.
Now onto the bad. The stand on the Dell. I mean what the hell? If the Gateway has one thing above almost all monitors I've seen, it's the stand. The thing has a base of what looks and feels like a 32 pound chunk of dense lead. I shit you not about the weight. I measured it. On top of that, it has a long extendable neck and can swivel the monitor so it sets vertically (great for old arcade shooters and portrait photos). The Dell sports a cheap bit of plastic that only adjusts tilt. It sucks. I have to put a book underneath it to get it to set at eye level. Sloppy. Plus the Dell has a rather small viewing angle. The Gateway trounces it here. I have to look at it from an extreme angle before I start seeing a goodly amount of discoloration. With the Dell, I swivel around in my chair a bit, and suddenly OMG BAD. Normally, this isn't something I take hugely into consideration when I'm getting a new monitor. 99% of the time, I'm staring dead on at the monitor. But I'm sure some of you do, so I'm throwing it out there.
So, final verdict? The old Gateway wins, though I'm still rather happy with the Dell. Specially so considering what I had to go through earlier today with the Hannspree. I originally intended on getting the Dell, but the stout stand, thicker chasis, and the added .6 inches of the Hannspree caught my eye at the store. I talked with the sales tech (bad idea), who swore it was easily the equivalent of the Dell. I take it home, pop it out, and find out the fucker LIED TO ME! First off, no DVI port. Just two HDMI and a VGA. Who in the fuck leaves a DVI port off a modern monitor? I'm not about to buy an overly expensive DVI-HDMI adapter when I have a boxfull of DVI cables sitting in my junk drawer. So I have to go search for something I hadn't seen in awhile. A VGA-DVI adapter. I finally find it, turn it on...and guess what? You think you've seen backlight bleed? You haven't seen backlight bleed. There were bars, probably about 3/4ths of an inch thick, of pure white light at the top and bottom of the screen. On top of that, the colors were washed out considerably, and the viewing angle made even this Dell look like a world class champ. I took it back and got what I originally should've bought to begin with.
So there you go. If anyone wants, I can take shots of the two monitors side by side, and show off how each one performs in dark game situations for anyone shopping for two new monitors, and want to compare these two.
