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Dell UltraSharp 1504FP 15 inch LCD MonitorProduct Information Bring home or office, the UltraSharp 1908FP LCD monitor and increase your productivity significantly. The large 19-inch...
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Product Information Bring home or office, the UltraSharp 1908FP LCD monitor and increase your productivity significantly. The large 19-inch Flat Panel LCD TFT active matrix screen of this Dell LCD monitor renders crisp, clear and lifelike images at1280 x 1024 of native resolution. Featuring 800:1 contrast ratio, this Dell monitor delivers darker blacks and brighter whites for realistic images. Thanks to 300 cd/m2 of brightness, this Dell LCD monitor reproduces sharper and brighter pictures, regardless of the room’s lighting conditions. Boasting a maximum viewing angle of 160 degrees - vertical and horizontal, this Dell monitor ensures crystal-clear visibility of the content, from almost anywhere. Designed with slim, sleek and lightweight form factor, the UltraSharp 1908FP takes up minimal space on your office desk.
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3 Reviews from Epinions.com
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Dell 1504FP
I'm not a big fan of LCD monitors. One of my biggest problems with them is that, in general, they only look sharp at one resolution. If you want to use a different resolution it usually looks jagged and fuzzy even if it's technically supported. They also tend to require head on viewing for clarity.
The Dell 1504FP is, unfortunately, no exception. It technically supports both 800x600 and 1024x768 screen resolutions but looking at the lower resolution is akin to looking at the world through a layer of vasoline. It does better than many other LCDs at handling off-angle viewing but it's still much clearer if you look dead on.
In also suffers from another problem common among LCD screens - pixelation effects. You can clearly see the pattern of criss-crossing lines across the screen at the pixel borders. While not displaying a sense of motion at these borders so better than many other monitors, the pixelation effect is noticeable and may be bothersome if you're particularly sensitive to such things.
At the requisite resolution and looking directly at the monitor it does display a crisp image. It offers a full range of colors which, while not as vivid as some of the better flat screen CRT monitors I've used, is still more than adequate for most tasks. I don't know that I'd watch DVDs with this monitor or want to use it for full time graphic design work, but for text work interspersed with the infrequent bit of graphics editing it's more than adequate.
The monitor has a relatively small footprint, although it's on the large side for a 15" LCD. It's fairly light - it's easy enough for one person to lift it out of the box and place it on a desk - but I still wouldn't want to carry it around with me or move it much. If you're used to CRT monitors it will seem small and light. If you've been using LCDs for a while it won't.
My biggest problem with the monitor actually has nothing to do with the display. Whoever designed the casing should be shot. In a painful place that will cause a nagging but not deadly injury. Yes, I want them to suffer. Almost as much as I did when I was hooking up this monitor. The biggest problem is that the various cords plug into the bottom back of the screen in a small slot narrow enough that average size fingers would have difficulty fitting. For someone with large fingers (like me) it's nearly impossible to position cords and cables let alone manage to screw them in. You can get away without screwing in cables on some monitors but because these hang down they must be screwed in. They give you almost no space between the various connectors so it gets progressively harder and harder as you progress. The monitor supports both analog and digital connections via separate cables (both included). The analog cable is attached when you get the monitor and I was unable to remove it even without any other cables impeding my access. I still have an extra cable leading nowhere coming from the back of my monitor. Just pushing the digital cable into its slot next to the analog was difficult; screwing it in was tortuous. The power cable, on the other side of the analog cable, was a bit easier but by no means a breeze.
They did do one thing right by supplying a coil at the back of the monitor behind the pole to feed cables through. That keeps them from flying all over the place. I was able to wind the analog cable around the pole and hook it through this ring to keep it somewhat out of the way, but in doing so I barely had enough space to also feed through the other cables.
The onscreen controls and buttons controlling them are also odd. The monitor has four buttons at the very right bottom of the front casing. The rightmost button, the power button, is the largest. The other three buttons are identical in size, with the left having an engraved -, the middle an engraved +, and the right one carrying no symbol. These markings are deceptive as pressing the left (-) button results in toggling between analog and digital modes and hitting the middle (+) button launches some sort of autoadjust process that doesn't actually seem to do anything to the screen. The rightmost small button does launch an onscreen menu and only then do the other buttons act as up/down buttons. They use embedded menus, grouping the various commands into categories and requiring extra button presses and guessing about how they organized things to actually do anything. The positioning menus are grayed out so if you aren't happy with the dead sections along the edges of the monitor you're out of luck. I found the entire process of adjusting the monitor tedious and difficult.
Basically the Dell is a decent but not terrific monitor for people who use mostly text-based applications but I would avoid this monitor like the plague if you do anything graphical with any regularity. I'd much rather have my old Viewsonic PF790 flat screen CRT but I've also used many worse monitors. As always, try to see a monitor in use at the resolution you want to use it at before making a purchasing decision.
Dell 1504FP Flat Panel LCD Monitor: Makes Me Miss My Viewsonic Even More
| Author's Rating: |
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Pros: cord guide at the back of monitor, reasonable at 1024x768
Cons: must use at 1024x768, pixelation effects, very poor connector location, badly designed onscreen controls
The Bottom Line:
I'd much rather have my old Viewsonic PF790 flat screen CRT but I've also used many worse monitors.
I'm not a big fan of LCD monitors. One of my biggest problems with them is that, in general, they only look sharp at one resolution. If you want to use a different resolution it usually looks jagged and fuzzy even if it's technically supported. They also tend to require head on viewing for clarity.
The Dell 1504FP is, unfortunately, no exception. It technically supports both 800x600 and 1024x768 screen resolutions but looking at the lower resolution is akin to looking at the world through a layer of vasoline. It does better than many other LCDs at handling off-angle viewing but it's still much clearer if you look dead on.
In also suffers from another problem common among LCD screens - pixelation effects. You can clearly see the pattern of criss-crossing lines across the screen at the pixel borders. While not displaying a sense of motion at these borders so better than many other monitors, the pixelation effect is noticeable and may be bothersome if you're particularly sensitive to such things.
At the requisite resolution and looking directly at the monitor it does display a crisp image. It offers a full range of colors which, while not as vivid as some of the better flat screen CRT monitors I've used, is still more than adequate for most tasks. I don't know that I'd watch DVDs with this monitor or want to use it for full time graphic design work, but for text work interspersed with the infrequent bit of graphics editing it's more than adequate.
The monitor has a relatively small footprint, although it's on the large side for a 15" LCD. It's fairly light - it's easy enough for one person to lift it out of the box and place it on a desk - but I still wouldn't want to carry it around with me or move it much. If you're used to CRT monitors it will seem small and light. If you've been using LCDs for a while it won't.
My biggest problem with the monitor actually has nothing to do with the display. Whoever designed the casing should be shot. In a painful place that will cause a nagging but not deadly injury. Yes, I want them to suffer. Almost as much as I did when I was hooking up this monitor. The biggest problem is that the various cords plug into the bottom back of the screen in a small slot narrow enough that average size fingers would have difficulty fitting. For someone with large fingers (like me) it's nearly impossible to position cords and cables let alone manage to screw them in. You can get away without screwing in cables on some monitors but because these hang down they must be screwed in. They give you almost no space between the various connectors so it gets progressively harder and harder as you progress. The monitor supports both analog and digital connections via separate cables (both included). The analog cable is attached when you get the monitor and I was unable to remove it even without any other cables impeding my access. I still have an extra cable leading nowhere coming from the back of my monitor. Just pushing the digital cable into its slot next to the analog was difficult; screwing it in was tortuous. The power cable, on the other side of the analog cable, was a bit easier but by no means a breeze.
They did do one thing right by supplying a coil at the back of the monitor behind the pole to feed cables through. That keeps them from flying all over the place. I was able to wind the analog cable around the pole and hook it through this ring to keep it somewhat out of the way, but in doing so I barely had enough space to also feed through the other cables.
The onscreen controls and buttons controlling them are also odd. The monitor has four buttons at the very right bottom of the front casing. The rightmost button, the power button, is the largest. The other three buttons are identical in size, with the left having an engraved -, the middle an engraved +, and the right one carrying no symbol. These markings are deceptive as pressing the left (-) button results in toggling between analog and digital modes and hitting the middle (+) button launches some sort of autoadjust process that doesn't actually seem to do anything to the screen. The rightmost small button does launch an onscreen menu and only then do the other buttons act as up/down buttons. They use embedded menus, grouping the various commands into categories and requiring extra button presses and guessing about how they organized things to actually do anything. The positioning menus are grayed out so if you aren't happy with the dead sections along the edges of the monitor you're out of luck. I found the entire process of adjusting the monitor tedious and difficult.
Basically the Dell is a decent but not terrific monitor for people who use mostly text-based applications but I would avoid this monitor like the plague if you do anything graphical with any regularity. I'd much rather have my old Viewsonic PF790 flat screen CRT but I've also used many worse monitors. As always, try to see a monitor in use at the resolution you want to use it at before making a purchasing decision.
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