Gateway FPD2485W 24" Widescreen LCD

Reviews: Multimedia

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Anthony Fiti
Kurtis
Gateway
Apr. 9, 2007

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Testing - Display

Calibrating the Gateway FPD2485W 24" LCD Monitor with my new Pantone Huey was particularly painful, though I don't think it's entirely Gateway's fault. I was able to calibrate my reference 20" widescreen display, however when I went to calibrate the Gateway, it turned the screen's white color tones to pink. I was stunned, and I tried the calibration two more times to the same result. I'm convinced it's a problem with Pantone's Huey software and I've since submitted problem reports to their support website.

I proceeded to calibrate it by eye, and the singular word to describe this display is! bright. Really bright. It puts just about every other LCD monitor I've seen to shame. I don't remember the Dell 24" LCD being this bright. Even turning brightness down to zero (which I did for my review) it was still fairly bright. The colors jumped out and were clearly visible. I used a simple program called Checkscreen to test basic display patterns and the only problem I could find was that I was able to produce some tearing; however in my three weeks of using the monitor I never found tearing to be an issue in any real world application.

Backlight issues were not a problem for this display - with a completely black screen, I could barely notice any places where it was not even. In a completely dark room the backlight stood up to the test. I've scanned various tech forums out there and have noticed that people have had some problems with the backlight, and it's entirely possible the problem is out there, but I didn't have that problem. (Ed: The same thing is true for many LCDs including Dell's 2005FPW which I own, but never had backlight problems myself.)

One problem I did have that I have also seen in the forums is banding. I went into Photoshop and created a simple black to white gradient and moved the application back and forth between my 20" reference display and the 24" Gateway LCD. Banding issues were really obvious. The gradient was completely smooth on the 20" display and bands that averaged 6-7mm long were very obvious on the Gateway display.

However, after tinkering with the display's settings I was able to minimize the banding problem by going into the OSD's advanced menu, using the color applet and changed it out of any of the "modes" they have to warm color, cool color or user color. The banding almost completely vanished; though there was still a little banding from about 70% gray to 90% gray.

I was able to watch both regular DVDs and HD-DVDs, thanks to this monitor's HDCP compliant DVI input. I watched The Fifth Element Superbit DVD as well as a portion of King Kong HD-DVD.

The Fifth Element looked really good. No ghosting or other problems with the video were observed. The brightness of the display made me forget that I was watching this on an LCD. King Kong also was spectacular in its full 1080P majesty; just like in The Fifth Element the colors were vibrant. Credit the excellent brightness of this display. Even in regular applications, colors seem deeper.

The display has 2.3M pixels, and all those pixels are going to need a powerful graphics card behind them, so before I get into how gaming looked on this display, I find it obligatory to mention that if you want to play games at the native resolution of the display, you're going to need a beefy card, or possibly two cards. (Ed: On average you get about 10-20% lower frame rates when gaming at 1920x1200 compared to 1600x1200, for comparison's sake.)

The most demanding game that I have currently is Microsoft's Flight Simulator X. Unfortunately I couldn't set the resolution up to 1920x1200, so I had to settle for 1680x1050. I believe this was due to a problem with the software and not anything to do with the monitor. Though this did also give me a chance to try out 1:1 pixel mapping, which I should mention worked perfectly with the image centered in the middle of the screen. I noticed no artifacting or any other display problems.

Doom 3 was an excellent game to test the display, and I found that except for minor occasional image tearing, I was able to play the game and it felt very immersive. The image quality was excellent, and I really felt a part of the game.

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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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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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