Zardon

Read The Review Here
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Not much point in having one of the latest and greatest graphics cards if you are still using a 14inch CRT circa 1997.

24inch monitors are gaining popularity within the enthusiast gaming community so with that in mind we take a look at Dell's 2407 screen, the follow up to the 2405 which we also reviewed last year. A competitively priced screen with a wide array of inputs. But does it offer high image quality as well?

Lelisevis

Eh that price

It's available just about everywhere else for £550, try overclockers etc.

Anyway this is the monitor im saving my pennies for or rather was, this review has cleared it up for me. Im not going to pay that sort of money for a monitor with banding issues. It's mentioned a few times in the review as though the worry was always in the reviewers mind. A quick google search has shown a lot of people are disappointed with it. I may instead just go for the smaller 20 inch model which apparently doesn't suffer with banding after 2 or 3 screen revisions that is unless someone can recommend something else in the 200-300 range?

Zardon

After seeing the thread on DH about overclockers in the retail discussion section im not sure id recommend anyone to get a monitor there. Actually its £565 on dell at the minute. seems pretty good value.

As for the banding, i could notice it a little on the 2405 I had, but its not really a major thing, so I agree with Peter on his comments.

Anyone else who has a 2405-2407 notice banding?

WhO_KnOwS

Keep in mind two things here. The first is that I noticed the banding because I was specifically looking for it (due to the same google search you did) and the second is that the newer revisions (A01 and higher) have almost no banding visible to the naked eye, especially in day to day operations. The tests I ran to see how much banding is present are made specifically for this purpose, so even if some banding was present there that doesn't mean that you'll notice it otherwise.
So unless you work with photoshop (or something similar) every day and do stuff that is extremely color sensitive the banding won't bother you, because you won't even notice it.

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Lelisevis

Oh right thanks for clearing that up. Overclockers version is A03 guaranteed. I might have to take another look at this though it would only be fair if you contributed the extra £200 LOL.

Very nice review by the way. Thankyou.



Edit: Oh and Zardon to clear up your worries about overclockers (co-incidently i've never had an issue with them and ive ordered a fair amount of stuff) this is taken directly from the website:

Warranty : 4 year next business day exchange supplied by Manufacturer (Call Dell on 0870 9080800 and have the work number from the original packaging handy)

Erroneus

It's a great monitor, i was seconds from getting one, but as I couldn't get any guarantees it would be a rev a03, i canceled it.

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calidan

I have the same revision that was reviewed and I don't notice any banding. This monitor is a good buy considering all the size and all the connections it has. I haven't really been playing a whole lot of computer games lately but the games I have played looked great.

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"Don't try to be like Jackie. There is only one Jackie.... Study computers instead." - Jackie Chan

pr0digal jenius

the introduction button on the DHTML menu jumps to the intro for the sli8800 review


good review though....couldn't find what software suite you tested the monitor with...is that dell's own stuff, or a benchie program?

Zardon

the javascript links are fine John and the application is mentioned on page 2.

http://www.displaymate.com/

pr0digal jenius

ah thanks...


and page 1, 2, and conclusion all work..but clicking where it actually says introduction [the big button] takes me to he slir eview...not an issue..i just found it odd


thanks for the info on the software tho....i liked the screens and tests, and guess I just missed the name


EDIT: boo...i'm not paying $$ to test a monitor I already bought just for fun

DudeBoyz

Does this monitor have built-in hardware support for Aspect Ratio scaling and such, so that you can set it within the firmware of the monitor and have it handle the display accordingly?

WhO_KnOwS

Yes, you can tell the monitor how it should scale the signal it recieves. I can stretch it, maintain the ratio or keep it at it's original size. There are even two pictures demonstrating this in the article.

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DudeBoyz

Thanks.

I went through the article and it seems there are two pics, but I cannot read them, as they are really blurry. I do wish they were re-taken and re-posted so they were clear and readable. Perhaps they will do that?

WhO_KnOwS

It's all on page 2 under Widescreen gaming

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DudeBoyz

It seems I just cannot read the info in those screen shots. They are quite blurred and I am not at all able to make out what they say.

I do wish they would take new shots - perhaps from a Tripod with better focus on the lens so they were readable.

Regardless though, now I'm going to try to find out if the Dell 2007FP shares that same functionality, cause if it does, that might be a good option for ATI card users, since the ATI drivers do not properly handle 1:1 and Aspect Ratio Scaling. I'll have to research image quality on that series too - I keep hearing about banding and ghosting on the Dell LCD's.

Thanks for point the specific page out to me. I appreciate it.

WhO_KnOwS

Those two shots are of the game Half Life 2: Episode 1. They represent the two scaling options. As you can see in one shot the picture is only displayed in the middle of the screen - that's the keep original resolution option. The other shots has black bars at the sides - that's the keep aspect ratio option. Hope it helps.

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DudeBoyz

Yeah - I just can't read the dialogs on screen is all, indicating what options you can set. It's all blurry.

WhO_KnOwS

AAAAH! You wanted to see the interface options! Here you go:

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DudeBoyz

Is that the screen where you set the aspect ratio and scaling options?

WhO_KnOwS

Indeed it is. As you can see the 2nd line has 3 options:
1:1 - keeps the original size (so a 1024x768 game will only fill a small portion in the middle of the screen)
4:3 - keeps the non-wide screen ratio (but scales the game, so a 1024x768 game would keep it's ratio, but be stretched to the full height of the screen)
fill - stretches and fills the screen (fills the screen, so the aspect ratio of 4:3 resolutions gets distorted. Wide screen resolutions only get upsized)

Obviously wide-screen apps that run at a lower resolution won't enable you to pick the middle option.

P.S. In the screenshot the options are grayed out because I was at my login screen which runs at 1920x1200, so no changes were possible.

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DudeBoyz

Okie. Thanks much.

What are those two screen shots that are so blurry? The dialog boxes in front of the game screen?

WhO_KnOwS

Those are just the game and its interface, nothing to do with the monitor itself.
The shots are only meant to show how scaling looks.

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DudeBoyz

So those two screen shots, directly under the Widescreen Gaming paragraph and above the Synthetic Testing area - the ones that are so fuzzy and right next to each other - those do not show monitor information?

I wanted to link directly to them with a direct URL but I can't seem to because they are Javascript only and disappear when I click on them. That's quite inconvenient.

Anyway, what exactly do they show?

WhO_KnOwS

They show what I said: The game Half Life 2: Episode 1 as it would look at 1024x768 in either 1:1 or 4:3 mode.

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DudeBoyz

So it is those two screens which show the OSD for the monitor?

It's just that they are out of focus and the OSD can't be read?

WhO_KnOwS

ARGH!
Those two screenshots display only the game and nothing else. The boxes you see are from the ingame menus (nothing to do with the monitor itself). You can see the OSD on the picture I posted in this thread.
The 1st picture displays how a game would look if you would play it at a lower resolution with the 1:1 mode enabled. The 2nd picture shows the game running at the same settings, but with the 4:3 mode enabled. Hope this clears things up.

The pictures are blury because the contents don't matter. The important parts on the pictures are the black lines around the game, which show how the image gets displayed in the different modes.

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Zardon

It is to stop leeching of images. before I started doing this, we had literally 50 gigs of data a month being used from leeched links on other sites. So while its inconvenient. Its working.

I honestly fail to understand how you arent understanding who_knows explanations in this thread. He is explaining (via the images) the scaling and the areas on the screen, not the actual sharpness of the monitor via the depicted images. it would be pointless in doing so anyway, you would be looking at the images through your own screen via digital camera jpegs, so there would be several other variables polluting the source images.

DudeBoyz

I guess that's the choice you guys have to make. Yep - it is horribly inconvenient.

DudeBoyz

I understand.

I have discovered that my Viewsonic VP2030b has a SCALE option that only works in Analog mode. I have been running in DVI-D mode, and that option is not available and relies on the Driver for that functionality. Unfortunately, ATI does not process all the resolutions with that setting, only odd ones like 1360x1024, which is a ratio of 1.3281 instead of 1.333. Nvidia's driver handles the signal properly, sending the information to the LCD that it should use 1:1 scaling and the true pixel size, provided you set it in the driver.

My Samsung 204b has NO such scaling option in the menu - digital or analog, and relies only on the driver itself. So, for the Viewsonic VP203b, if I don't mind a bit less clarity, I can use the D-SUB connector, run the thing in Analog and get the scaling I want smack in the hardware of the LCD itself. But the DVI-D is so crisp, I prefer to leave it there and don't use the LCD for gaming. It is on my other machine, which acts like a "Super-Peer", or mini-server, for the other 3 machines in my room.

Anyway, on the Viewsonic VP2030b, there is an unique menu option that has 3 options, one of which is 1:1. You get to that screen and push the up or down buttons on the front of the monitor and it lets you pick which of the 3 options you want.

That is what I THOUGHT was that blurred out dialog on those 2 screen shots under Widescreen Gaming. I see how the game screen has bars on the sides - I just thought that the dialog in the middle-right on each of those two images was the OSD for the monitor.

I do understand the functionality, I was just mistaken about what those images contained.

Sorry for being so dense.

Zardon

Actually the only inconvenience is the fact that people cant leech or hard link to images - 95% of this "inconvenience" will be leechers and guys we don't want to help, the other 5% will be forum members wanting to link to images on the site. The benefits with our system far outweigh the negatives. You don't have to close a ton of windows after reading the review as the windows autoclose or conveniently close when clicked on without hunting for the top right "X" - also no more than one image can be opened at a time, to keep the end user experience cleaner. They also auto centre on screen and resize to the user's screen resolution if they are partially off screen (if we so desire). Not only this but its fully supported in XP, Vista with Firefox, IE 6/7, Opera, Firefox. Not only this, it runs server side and doesnt require huge downloads to everyone's home machine.......... and to top it all it doesn't cause issues in Mac OSx with safari.......

Its a pretty slick system and it stops a substantial amount of bandwidth hogging from slowing down the user experience on the site.