Dell's 2005FPW. I'll never go back to a CRT Monitor!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Price, performance, contrast, brightness, size, color, viewing angles.

Cons: At the price I paid for them, absolutely none.

The Bottom Line: 
Easily one of the best purchases I've made in a long while. With coupons, the performance to price ratio is incredible. I'd dare say the best LCD for the price.

Author's Review
Background
For quite some time I've wanted an LCD display. They have a nice bright display, and their small stature makes them excellent for desks. I was reluctant to pick one up for several reasons. I'm a hardcore PC gamer, so ghosting issues were a concern. I also run a dual monitor setup, and didn't want to go back to a single monitor, even if it was an LCD. Finally I do a lot of image editing on my PC which requires faithful color reproduction.
It's starting to become common knowledge that Dell offers some fantastic deals during the quarterly sales. My guess is the extra revenue these generate help boost quarterly financials which makes the Board of Directors happy, which in turn gives managment nice bonuses. But I digress. At the end of the 1st quarter, it was no different. They had 20.1" LCD's for $370 with free shipping. So for the normal price of one 20.1" LCD I could get 2. Sweet. After doing some research, I decided to try them out. I'm very glad I did.


Specs
20.1" Viewing Area
Native Resolution: 1680x1050
DVI,D-Sub,S-video,Composite inputs
5 USB2.0 Ports (4 out, 1 in)
Brightness Ratio: 600:1
Pixel Response Time(Typical): 16ms Grey to Grey
Colors: 16.7 Million (24-bit true color)


Whats in the Box
LCD Panel
LCD Base
DVI, D-SUB, and USB Cable
Instructions, Setup CD-ROM, and lots of styrofoam.


Buying an LCD Monitor
There are a few things that you should look for when buying an LCD. The specs are important because they impact the performance of the monitor. Having a faster pixel response time will decrease the ghosting effect. A higher contrast ratio will provide darker blacks--generally CRT's are the kings of contrast. Color depth is important, as cheaper LCD's don't actually show 16.7 million colors (laptop LCD's are almost always like this). The wider the viewing angle, the less color distortion you'll notice when you shift The last thing to make a note of is the LCD's native resolution. Displaying any resolution other than its native resolution will produce noticiably poor images.


My Experience with the monitors
My experience thus far is overwhelmingly positive. Setup and configuration was easy. The monitors don't look as snazzy as some other LCD panels, but they're not eyesores. My two panels didn't have any dead or stuck pixels, but if they did, Dell has a very good exchange policy and will replace any defective panels (they actually ship you the replacement before you send back the defective LCD).


Gaming
As I mentioned earlier; I'm into games, and having an LCD with minimal ghosting is necessary. I'm very satisfied with this monitors performance gaming. In fact I observed no discernable ghosting whatso ever when playing GuildWars and Swat4 (the only 2 games i've played since purchasing the monitors). The 2005fpw's 1680x1050's is a unique resolution, and not many games support it (GuildWars does and the game looks awesome!)


Videos
Videos are also effected by ghosting, and since there is no ghosting when playing games, there shouldn't be any ghosting while watching videos right? Wrong. Sike. No ghosting while watching videos.


Photo Editing
So far, the Dell LCD has been great for my photo editing needs. I don't have a hardware calibrator, so my calibration is done with Adobe Gamma. One great thing about the 2005FPW is that it can rotate to portrait display. This makes editing portraits easier. I do have to mention that the icc profile that comes on the setup CD is busted, because when its applied, all the colors have a major green tint to them. Calibrated, the monitor is bright and produces nice colors.


Other use
Having two wide-screen monitors is just obscene. I've got plenty of desktop space. Its very easy to run two browsers side by side, but I generally stick the browser in the middle and keep the sides for widgets and my AIM buddy list. The viewing angles are perfect for my needs (I tend not to move around while computing), as is the brightness and contrast.


So what don't I like
Honestly, there is nothing I don't like about these monitors. Apparently earlier batches of these monitors had problems with backlights being to bright and causing uneven brightness problems. Thankfully the newer batches appear to have address this issue as mine display show no signs of the problem. The monitor also comes with an optional spearker bar, but it looks pretty lame, and I already have a 5.1 Klipsch speaker system. I'd also like my graphics card to detect when I rotate the monitor and have it automatically switch the display, instead of having to do it manually. This is a minor convience and with Nvidia, its possible to assign this to a key-stroke combination. This monitor's native resolution may not be supported by your graphics card. Certainly newer cards will support 1680x1050, but make sure you check first. You wouldn't want to get these beauties home only to find out you can't use them correctly. As others have mentioned, make sure you wait for the special deals when buying this monitor. It can be had for under $450 easily. I guess I could be mad that the monitors aren't larger, but thats just being picky :)


Last Notes
The Dell 2005fpw shares the same exact LCD panel as the Apple 20" Cinema Display. This is conforting to know because the ACD is a highly rated display, and used in many professional graphic design firms. If its good enough for the pros, it should be good enough for me.