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Although Dell specificed shipping time at 1-2 weeks, mine went out the day after I ordered.
This is my first Dell monitor. I'm impressed with the stand and sheer size. Quality seems good. Previously I used a Sony SDM-P234/B and Apple Cinema HD, before that a 17" Samsung 170T.
Revision of my monitor is A02. It has no dead pixels, nor do I hear any spurious sounds. I installed the Vista driver (without the .icm profile) and turned the backlight to maximum using the control panel applet. Then I did a basic calibration using Everest Ultimate 4.0. Once I established proper brightness and contrast settings, I then adjusted the gamma of each color individually. This is all done using the Nvidia Control Panel from the 158.18 Vista driver. I have to say this was quite easy and painless, and results are very good. I actually like not having an OSD and separate monitor adjustments, it is easiest to make all the adjustments from one component.
Brightness is excellent, and colors are very vibrant. Black looks great! It definitely has more snap to than the Sony, which is not a shabby monitor at all. In Vista I am running it at full 2560x1600 with a Nvidia 7900GTX (will upgrade to latest and greatestDX10 cards in SLI later in the year for Crysis and the other upcoming DX10 games). The monitor does scale the BIOS and bootup screens just fine, something that I was concerned about. As long as you have a dual-link DVI video card, scaling with this monitor is not a problem.
No doubt this monitor is a beast but it scales well with my almost finished library built-ins. It is not overwhelming at all. And it is not particularly heavy at all. Sitting 3-4 feet away it is just about perfect. As long as my contact lenses are clean and not dried out, or I have my glasses on, the 0.25mm dot pitch is not a problem without DPI scaling. I'm 38 years old and moderately nearsighted.
The power button can be configured to turn off the monitor, or bring up the Vista shut down menu. Built-in card reader works great and is a nice convenience. I bought a AS501 speaker off Ebay for $13 shipped, and will install it once it arrives. I have a very high end audio system in a separate dedicated room and only need/want basic sound with the PC.
Overall if you have the space for it and plan on using it as a dedicated computer monitor, I think this is the best thing out there. Considering I paid under $1200 with shipping (using a 20% off coupon) I'm very, very happy!
Here is the picture. The screen looks vastly better in person, obviously it is way overexposed and the color temp is off in this picture. I'll try to get a better shot of the monitor itself later.
By the way, it is cool watching full 1080p video running in a window on the desktop! I definitely will enjoy having my desktop size increased from 1920x1200 to 2560x1600. Only downside of course is investing in enough GPU power to run games at native resolution; that said, games look okay scaled down unlike text, so running them at 1920x1200 or 1680x1050 is very reasonable until the SLI 8900GTX is available
This is my first Dell monitor. I'm impressed with the stand and sheer size. Quality seems good. Previously I used a Sony SDM-P234/B and Apple Cinema HD, before that a 17" Samsung 170T.
Revision of my monitor is A02. It has no dead pixels, nor do I hear any spurious sounds. I installed the Vista driver (without the .icm profile) and turned the backlight to maximum using the control panel applet. Then I did a basic calibration using Everest Ultimate 4.0. Once I established proper brightness and contrast settings, I then adjusted the gamma of each color individually. This is all done using the Nvidia Control Panel from the 158.18 Vista driver. I have to say this was quite easy and painless, and results are very good. I actually like not having an OSD and separate monitor adjustments, it is easiest to make all the adjustments from one component.
Brightness is excellent, and colors are very vibrant. Black looks great! It definitely has more snap to than the Sony, which is not a shabby monitor at all. In Vista I am running it at full 2560x1600 with a Nvidia 7900GTX (will upgrade to latest and greatestDX10 cards in SLI later in the year for Crysis and the other upcoming DX10 games). The monitor does scale the BIOS and bootup screens just fine, something that I was concerned about. As long as you have a dual-link DVI video card, scaling with this monitor is not a problem.
No doubt this monitor is a beast but it scales well with my almost finished library built-ins. It is not overwhelming at all. And it is not particularly heavy at all. Sitting 3-4 feet away it is just about perfect. As long as my contact lenses are clean and not dried out, or I have my glasses on, the 0.25mm dot pitch is not a problem without DPI scaling. I'm 38 years old and moderately nearsighted.
The power button can be configured to turn off the monitor, or bring up the Vista shut down menu. Built-in card reader works great and is a nice convenience. I bought a AS501 speaker off Ebay for $13 shipped, and will install it once it arrives. I have a very high end audio system in a separate dedicated room and only need/want basic sound with the PC.
Overall if you have the space for it and plan on using it as a dedicated computer monitor, I think this is the best thing out there. Considering I paid under $1200 with shipping (using a 20% off coupon) I'm very, very happy!
Here is the picture. The screen looks vastly better in person, obviously it is way overexposed and the color temp is off in this picture. I'll try to get a better shot of the monitor itself later.
By the way, it is cool watching full 1080p video running in a window on the desktop! I definitely will enjoy having my desktop size increased from 1920x1200 to 2560x1600. Only downside of course is investing in enough GPU power to run games at native resolution; that said, games look okay scaled down unlike text, so running them at 1920x1200 or 1680x1050 is very reasonable until the SLI 8900GTX is available