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Gateway FPD2485W 24" Widescreen LCD
Setup
The assembly wasn't intuitive but if you actually read the directions (what a concept) you'll see exactly how it goes together. The stand is screwed into the base of the stand using a thumb screw. You essentially hang the LCD from the stand with a tab and a spring loaded lever that keeps it in place. Then start connecting your components through the many connectors on the back of the unit. Gateway has a very unique On Screen Display system. I previously mentioned the light up buttons that are invisible when they are not backlit. The other very interesting characteristic about the display is that it has sound effects. When you turn the monitor on, you'll hear a startup sound, and as you browse through the pages of the OSD, you'll get chimes as well to indicate a selection, scrolling through options, etc. When you hit the menu button to bring up the OSD, you'll get a list of shortcuts to various applets that Gateway has setup in advance. Things like turning on and off PIP, adjusting the video options, etc. To get to the main menu and all the available options, you just push the menu button again to bring up the full list of options: Picture, PIP Settings, Video Adjust, Geometry and Advanced, along with a reset option. The picture applet lets you adjust the brightness, contrast and gamma for the current input. Next up is the PIP settings, which will turn on and off the PIP, along with adjust the size, location, video input, and transparency. You can also swap the main and PIP video inputs and adjust the brightness and contrast of the PIP video.     In the video adjustment area, I was able to test the scaling, and was able to check that 1:1 would work for standard 4:3 and 5:4 ratios, and with my GeForce 7900GS video card, I was able to set the resolution to 1600x1200 and have the black bars on either side. Not that you would want to run at this resolution when you can have the great 1920x1200 resolution you paid all that money for, but it might be important for games that don't support widescreen aspect ratios. There were also several other options such as sharpness, noise reduction, film mode detection and video enhancement, but those were all grayed out when the monitor was hooked up with DVI. Likewise, the geometry input was grayed out when displaying DVI as well. Finally the advanced applet has tools to modify color temperature, OSD language, LED mode (night, day), DVI Video Mode, audio feedback, information and resolution reminder. The color temperature mode has several preset themes (web, movie, picture and game), along with a normal and cool color temperature mode, and a user customizable mode where you can adjust red, green and blue. The available OSD languages are English, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. The LED mode didn't seem to change anything that I could notice on the display. The DVI video mode has a selection for using RGB color space or YUV color space. The Audio Feedback is where you can turn down (or off) the chimes played as you go through the OSD system. Information will tell you what resolution and refresh rate your display is currently running at, the input type, and the firmware of the monitor. Finally, the resolution reminder is a feature that, thankfully, you can turn off. If the monitor senses you're not running at the full 1920x1200 resolution, it will pop up a reminder that you might want to turn up your resolution to use the full capacity of the monitor. Unlike other active annoyances that have been around for ages (Clippy, I'm looking at you), you can turn this feature off quite easily. (Ed: I could see that feature being useful for people who don't know much about computers and just got the 24" for its size and know nothing about resolutions! I'm sure they're out there.)
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Looks & Tech Specs Page 3: Taking a Closer Look Page 4: Setup Page 5: Testing - Display Page 6: Testing - Features Page 7: Max's Thoughts Page 8: Conclusion 
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Add Comment
10 User Comments 1 - Posted by
Ryley
on April 30, 2007 - 10:45 pm I bought the Gateway FPD2485W 24" Widescreen LCD about 2 months ago. I had planned on getting the 24'' Dell, but found this on sale at a near by electronics chain for $649. Being impatient, I got the Gateway. I'm mainly a gamer and I've had no issues or problems with it. Based on my experience I'd recommend it.
2 - Posted by
Kurtis
on May 1, 2007 - 12:54 am Welcome to our forums, Ryley, and thank you for sharing your experience with the Gateway 24" LCD. :)
3 - Posted by
treesfall
on May 13, 2007 - 10:27 am I bought this monitor and returned it once so far for the backlight issue...it had a light grey spot about the size of a lemon in the upper right corner...I have a photo I could upload if interested..that monitor was a febuary 07 build. I exchanged it at circuit city for a march build. The backlight is better, I can live with what I see but it is not perfect. I am using the monitor in analog and I want to use DVI to see if it helps the picture, but I am having a problem with that. With DVI conected, everything looks great through the windows 2000 startup screen. After the startup screen, when the desktop should be visible, the screen goes blank and says "no input". I don't know if it is monitor related or card related. I'm having a love-hate relationship with this thing so far. Oh, another thing, text is not sharp all across the screen, there are sharp patches and fuzzy patches scattered around. I was hoping DVI would fix that but I can't get DVI to work. Color banding is not very noticible in the photoshop gradient test as described in this article, but I do notice it when watching a movie if a glowing light or similar is part of the picture. That's my thoughts for now, I have been using this march monitor for a week now.
4 - Posted by
Max Slowik
on May 13, 2007 - 11:20 am No shit? Me too, the upper right corner is the worst. I mean, it's not as bad as it could be, I don't want to make it seem like it's catastrophic, and I've definitely seen LCD displays with some more prominent pinching/warping of the TFT around the edges, but it's at least noticeable when you're looking at it. I've been using light or gray backgrounds to mitigate it. I want to RMA this monitor so badly, but I need it right now because I'm reviewing video cards :) Kurtis, make someone send me a display so I can RMA this one. (I still love the PiP stuff. It's priceless.) 5 - Posted by
treesfall
on May 14, 2007 - 8:18 am The upper right corner of mine was terrible. I could see that spot all the time, even on a fairly busy backround picture. It made watching a movie really annoying. the problem seemed heat related, screen looked fine when cold, half hour later that upper right corner was really warm in the back compared to the rest of it. My fuzzy text issue was fixed with an auto adjust, oops, shoulda done that before complaining. My DVI issue is my gfx card I am pretty sure. I threw on V for Vendetta last night to review the color banding again, it really looks bad displaying smoke and glowing lights, I mean really bad. Still not sure if this thing is a keeper, but the extra desktop space is awesome and other than movie watching (which is 75% of the reason I bought this thing) I do like it.
6 - Posted by
sirebral
on May 23, 2007 - 10:21 pm I bought this monitor in December. I am going to have to take it back because the USB ports have totally failed. They won't even drive a 16 mb thumb drive. In addition, I am having the same issue with a bright spot in the upper left corner. Also, the PIP function is messed up. Every time I use it and the monitor goes into sleep mode, it forgets which input it is on and I have to unplug it to get it to recognize that it is still attached to my running computer.
7 - Posted by
Nate
on August 3, 2007 - 8:00 am Ive had this monitor for about 3 months,I bought it at Best Buy for 550 dollars,and I use my pc mostly for gaming.I installed the Nvidia geforce 8500 GT graphics card and the graphics are great.I havent had one single problem with this monitor yet.I would recomend it to anyone who is looking for a widescreen monitor.Not only does it perform well,it has some nice features too.
8 - Posted by
wlb
on August 9, 2007 - 9:20 am guys see my review-the comments across the net have been rife with problems, but honestly i haven't had any with this monitor-perhaps it's a quality control problem with Gateway because their stock has been tanking and they are dumping money into the don't pass line
9 - Posted by
PaulyC
on October 10, 2008 - 5:11 pm I posted over at the "main" thread of the FPD2485W at AVS. My monitor is just a bit over a year old and some faints spots which are right in the middle of the screen have become much worse. I called Gateway when the monitor was well within the support range, but couldn't get through to anyone.... I attributed it to normal LCD clouding, I work normally with dark Interfaced screens, Photoshop etc. so it never bothered me much, So now that it's worse, I called Gateway again, their support is beyond bad, they couldn't even find my monitor until after being put on hold 3 times. Then I was of course told that my monitor is a couple months out of warranty and couldnt be covered, I tried to explain to them that the spots have been there for awhile, but now the spots have worsened.... even had the person agree that burn-in spots couldn't happen overnight, but she didn't budge.. I of course won't be buying any Gateway products in the future, so tired of companies making products that break soon after the warranty expires... its all a conspiracy right??? hah So a warning, for others whom may buy a similar Gateway product... When I tried to call back in February, and couldn't even get past the first automated question which was enter your 10 digit Serial #... I bought mine at Best Buy so perhaps they use a different # for them? but it's a 13 digit Serial #.. When you didnt enter a serial # their computer recognizes, (i tried many different versions) it didn't send you to another menu..or an operator.. the automated person said sorry and hung up on you.. sounds like a good operation haha. When I called this week they had the same opening automated Serial #.. couldn't get it to work, hangs up on you if you don't enter the proper serial #... that's at best devious, and at worst criminal. Being a little more diligent this time, and after some investigation through the web I found a phone # which again asked the serial # but somehow got it to work, only after being on hold for 30 minutes. I wouldn't recommend them for anything to be quite frank. And don't ever buy anything this expensive (comparatively) with only a year warranty, companies like Gateway use very low class screens and slap a one year warranty on them... They'll get you everytime... 10 - Posted by
Kurtis
on October 10, 2008 - 9:39 pm PaulyC: Really sorry to hear about your terrible experience with Gateway - after we tested one, I'm not really surprised, but sorry to hear it nonetheless. Thanks for sharing, though, so others can learn from your experience.
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