Dell Ultrasharp 2005FPW 20.1" Widescreen LCD

Reviews: Multimedia

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Anthony Fiti
Kurtis
Dell
Apr. 25, 2006

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Testing - Features

When I first got the monitor, I quickly realized that it was about time I upgraded my video card as well. Because of the display's high native resolution (1680x1050), playing any game on my GeForce Ti4200 (even older ones that aren't graphics-intensive) would really tax my system. I had to bring the resolution down and let the display scale up the image to get acceptable frame rates. Of course, since this is an LCD, nothing looks as good as the native resolution because anything else is upscaled to the native resolution. It was bearable, but it's definitely not preferable. So make sure you've got a kickin' video card if you intend to play a lot of games at the native resolution of the LCD panel.

If you're going to need a new video card, remember that you rarely see cards benchmarked at a resolution of 1680x1050. You can approximate it by figuring that this resolution has 35% more pixels than 1280x1024 and 8% less pixels than 1600x1200, so video card performance should be a little bit better than what you experience at 1600x1200.

While we're talking about gaming in widescreen, I should note that while many recent titles support widescreen aspect ratios, some games may require some modification to run at a widescreen aspect ratio. Usually such techniques involve editing the registry or changing an INI file. Unfortunately, some games aren't fixable at all. To figure out if you can play your favorite game in widescreen, check out the Widescreen Gaming Forum.

The next features I tested were the Picture-in-Picture (PiP) and Picture-by-Picture (PbP) modes. For testing, I hooked my TiVo up to the Dell 2005FPW monitor through both composite and S-Video inputs. The S-Video picture looked better than the composite, most likely due to the fact that S-Video does a better job at transporting the picture than does composite. I also had the TiVo hooked up to my CRT TV as well. One of the first things I noticed about the television picture was that the aspect ratio was 16:10 (the aspect ratio of the monitor) instead of the standard 4:3.

The PbP setting didn't seem as useful when watching TV and using the computer, or using two computers at the same time. The two large black bars at the top and bottom of the display take up an awful lot of room. While PbP would be more useful on larger displays (24", 27" or 30" LCD displays), the windows seem just too small to use on this 20" display. I do enjoy the PbP display on my large HDTV, but the display is 61" and both pictures are large enough that you can stand to watch them from 8' away (it's like two 28" TVs side by side). One final note on the PbP and PiP is that you can only choose between the video inputs and the computer inputs. That is to say, in PiP or PbP mode, you can either choose from VGA or DVI as one of the pictures, and Composite or S-Video as the other picture. You cannot have the DVI input as the primary and the VGA as the secondary or visa versa with PiP or PbP.

Overall, viewing television on the LCD had the same type of issues that I saw watching the DVD: color noise and scaling a standard definition picture up to a high resolution. The display does look good if you're sitting back far enough though, since the small problems with the source image aren't recognizable once you're two or three feet from the display.

The Dell 2005FPW LCD Monitor also manages to function as a four-port USB hub. I had no problems hooking up a USB cable from my PC to my monitor, and was able to plug in all sorts of USB devices - from an iPod Shuffle, a Sandisk flash drive, USB keyboard and mouse, and finally a joystick. They all worked without problems.

Finally, the Dell 2005FPW LCD Monitor has the ability to pivot and change the orientation from landscape to portrait. I tried the portrait mode while using some office applications and found it to be just OK. While technically it worked perfectly, I just didn't find the orientation that useful - the screen was too slim with the 10:16 aspect ratio (inverted due to the rotation). While this orientation would be very useful for an information kiosk (an airport flight listing screen for example), it isn't that useful for every day use. If you do use portrait mode, it probably won't be long before you find yourself switching it back to landscape orientation to play any games or watch DVDs.

That said, I actually use the portrait orientation every day at work so I can find it useful - just not on the Dell 2005FPW LCD monitor. The LCD I use at work is a 20" 4:3 monitor (as opposed to 16:10). The display is 1200 pixels wide and 1600 pixels tall in portrait mode and I find it very usable when working on web pages and writing code and documentation. While co-workers may look at me weird when they see my display, I've been working this way for four years now and have no desire to go back. I would estimate that a larger display (24"+) would probably be sufficiently wide to use in portrait mode on a daily basis at home for browsing the web, using office applications, etc.

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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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