Dell Ultrasharp 2005FPW 20.1" Widescreen LCD

Reviews: Multimedia

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Anthony Fiti
Kurtis
Dell
Apr. 25, 2006

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Setup

Setup is sort of self-explanatory for a monitor. You plug it in and it'll work. Dell does provide the user with a CD containing drivers, and you are recommended to install those drivers. You'll need to adjust your resolution to the native resolution of 1680x1050 so that your desktop fills the entire LCD panel without any stretching or having a black border around the display. In my case, I also made my fonts a little larger through Windows so that I could read them. The last step in the physical installation is plugging in the USB cable (not included) from the computer to the monitor so that the other USB devices plugged into the monitor will operate.

One of the first things I did when I got my LCD out of the box and installed was to turn the brightness down to zero. I found that out of the box the display was just far too bright for the environment. Even now, turning the brightness up even to 30 makes things appear washed out. Of course, I also have access to 20" Cinema Displays hooked up to Macs at work and I'm used to the much more muted tones those displays emit.

Speaking of adjusting the brightness, I found the OSD menu to be mediocre. I would often fumble with buttons, wondering which ones to push to get into or out of the menu. They also aren't labeled very well. Granted, there are icons on each button which show the button's function, but if your finger is on top of the button, you don't see what its function is because your finger isn't transparent. And the five buttons aren't nearly intuitive enough to know what is what without some sort of label - this is definitely not your iPod user interface. And considering how infrequently OSD controls are used by the average person, each time the user goes to manipulate the display it is likely that they won't remember from the last time they did this three months ago, with the possible exception of someone using picture-in-picture (PiP) or picture-by-picture (PbP).

I did use the Nvidia display panel to adjust my monitor slightly to get it to what I felt was the correct picture. I turned the contrast up slightly (after using the monitor to turn the brightness all the way down). The reason I used the Nvidia display panel to adjust contrast is that you can't adjust contrast via the OSD when using a DVI-D connection. That was the only adjustment that I performed with my unaided eye for using it from day to day.

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Page 3 of 7

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Page 1: Introduction & First Looks
Page 2: Taking a Closer Look
Page 3: Setup
Page 4: Testing - Display
Page 5: Testing - Features
Page 6: Dell Tech Support Experience
Page 7: Conclusion

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