Gateway FPD2485W

[hobo]eclipse

So the Gateway FPD2485W on display at Best Buy got the best of me and the plastic came out and BAM! i walked out the door with it! I have till Sunday to take it back for a full refund. Anywho.... Coming from a collection of 17 inch CRT's i hope im not being naive here. The 2 models in store were both Nov 06 builds and the one, mind u only one sitting there, i got was a JAN 07 build. Overall it seems an excellent build, very little heat and i have yet to spot one dead/stuck pixel, very minimal backlight bleeding with a black screen, it scales other resolutions very nicely at 1:1(black bars), also it can stretch or ZOOM decently(both of which im not really interested in)(DVI). The contrast ratio displays whites way easier it seems than the darker, the darkside seems to be displayed correctly i though in a 20 shade gray test from everest now that i tuned the gamma on my video card up to 2.2 and tuned the colors down. Minimal ghosting in Source titles and STALKER beta, and the 256 RAM x1950XT performs alot better than i thought it would, so far......heh! I dont have access to anything component to try the inputs, imma try some ps2 on the composite and a dvd on S-VIDEO. Will nice HT quality gold plated RCA's work for component cables right and without harm to harware?

Now somethings i can gripe about. How much banding should i be seeing, without tuning the ATI CCC color it was bad on gradients, and was dark, tuned the brightness and contrast on the monitor, then did the gamma in the CCC, first up to like 1.1 then tuned the colors down but i still seen bandind(less though) and the 20 band grayscale wast exactly very nice on the darkside, now at 2.2 with the colors tuned in all blacks seem alot better and the grayscale is nice. the banding is kinda a mixed bag, the red and blue to black gradient images look excellent now, the white to black is alright but the green is horrible! un godly, i'll have to retune the green, Pleaze help me with any input about these LCD's like i said all i ever had was a CRT i never tuned.

Also how can i test the DVI to be sure its HDCP compliant? I ran a program from Power DVD and it said my Videa card was compliant but the Dislpay wasn't! hopefully its just the proggy but how can i check? Do the DVI out puts on my x1950xt differ in any way? Like i sai i gotta take this back by sunday so any suggestions for things to throw at this thing I'm all up for.

[hobo]eclipse

OK, so i decided to keep it, i can say i am glad i did! played around abit more with the color settings in the ATI CCC and am happy with it. Im not big into photo editing and in my everyday use of gaming, netz surfing, general CPU usage, movie watching, and now XBOX360, it perfrorms great! havent noticed any banding effects except for when I hunt for them on a gradient. The blacks were a bit crushed at first on the DVI, but the color tuning fixed that. The component images blacks were crushed quite abit with the 360 and the components do not accept 1080p over them but 1080i works fine. Picked up a nice fat 360 VGA cable and the colors are excellent, prolly not quite as vibrant as they could have been on the component but more importantly the blacks are displayed way more correctly, very much less of the 'crushing" effect. Still have yet to find dead or stuck pixel anywhere, the heat is still very minimal and navigating the touch sensitive buttons has become quite abit easier after havin it awhile.

The only thing i am lost about it the HDCP and if it "works". I guess the only way to tell would be to hook up a HD/BR disk layer via DVI and try it. But i was leaning more toward the rout of the xbox 360 HD drive add on. It would require the HDCP to work if i hooked it up via USB to my rig, right? at least to be able to see HD DVD's in HD, right? if it didnt work i would get the down scaled image? also what about with the xbox 360 hooked via VGA? When its hooked up VGA the video output is given as just common resolutions , no i or p. right now im set at 1920*1080, if i hooked the drive to the 360 and the 360 the LCD via VGA would i get the full rez of the movies or would it downscale it?

Necrosis

You should be fine w/ your video card since it does have HDCP built in. Using the 360 you'll have full resolution.