Dell U2412M

I have three I bought... November 2011 I believe. Have never skipped a beat and still amazing screens for the 300 I paid each back then.
 
I have an A04 version & can't seem to find any profile setups for it. Anyone have a recommendation for color settings? I went to tftcentral but there's not info on A04 version.

I just bought a 3rd u2412m from Staples, will be here sometime this/next week. The antiglare coating on the A00 that I use as my main is just so severe. It's so much better with the later versions.
 
I just got a Rev A05 in, manufactured October 2017. This is a new rev released sometime in the last 6 months.
This one has the same spotty AG as my Rev A02 (May 2015). Maybe it's a crapshoot, or Dell switched back to the old AG. It's once again using a new panel, there's a new noticable color tinting effect from different angles. No matter what settings I use, the edges of the monitor have a lime-green tint. It's pretty subtle though, but definitely worse than the previous rev.

So far A04 is the best revision, see my previous post. I don't have any A03's, though.
 
Can anyone comment on the correct color range settings for an intel graphics chip on the dell u2412m? I'm trying to remotely help a friend troubleshoot issues with dark scenes being too dark in video games. He had adjusted the gamma in win10 but is complaining the monitor now looks very grainy.

My plan was to have him reset everything using on-monitor controls, reset the win10 color calibration, install the monitor's driver/color profile from the dell site, and then make sure his intel drivers are set to the correct color output. Having some problems figuring out what the correct color output actually is however.

I used to own this monitor (and didn't have any problems) before selling it to my friend, so I'm sorta on the hook for tech support :)
 
Seems Dell is still making these in late 2018.

Staples had them on sale for $119.99 with a black friday sale. They also give me a coupon for $10 off of a $50 purchase. So i ordered one on 11-19-2018 to replace my 2209wa on my main computer. Told my brother and he got one a day or two later for his wife's computer. He liked it enough that he also got one for himself just before the sale ended. Mine was shipped from Illinois. The first one my brother bought was local pickup. The second was shipped to him from California.

Mine is version A08 manufactured in August 2018.
Both my brothers are version A07 manufactured in June 2018.
So seems they not only still making them, but also updating them in 2018.

Seems like a nice monitor. Much lighter anti-glare than on my 2209wa.

I tried using some setup graphics to visually set up the monitor. But in the end all I ended up changing from default setting was to lower the brightness (75 was default, currently using 34). If i really wanted to nit-pick, about the only thing I could find fault with is that on pure white full screen, the right side of the screen does seem slightly darker than the left side. But it is really very slight, and only noticeable at all on a blank white screen.

Overall I am quite pleased. Seems like a nice monitor. Especially considering I paid less than $120 (including taxes and shipping was free).
 
Still using my pair every day that I bought several years ago. I paid alot more thant $120 :)
 
Bought one for $400 in November 2011 and recently sold it to a friend for $100. It's a great monitor, but I'd never go back to using a 16:10 screen for gaming.
 
dark_reign said:
Bought one for $400 in November 2011 and recently sold it to a friend for $100. It's a great monitor, but I'd never go back to using a 16:10 screen for gaming.
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I play everything at 1920x1080 unless it has a highly stretchable FOV slider. Most games will cut the FOV pretty hard to fit the extra height.
 
I tried to get a couple for my wife and ended up getting a pair of HP EliteDisplay E241i instead because they weren't available.
Also, I decided to upgrade not too long ago to a triple 27" dell setup, 1440p. I can't remember what model they are (they are in my office) but they are native DP 2.0 and support daisy chaining which works well most of the time.
 
Still rocking mine, I believe I got them in November 2011 on a Black Friday deal for 329 each or something similar x 3 for Eyefinity / NV Surround. No issues, no faults and they still work like the day I bought them. Don't expect to need replacements for good while.
 
My A02 just turned 3 and still looks the same as the day I unboxed it, no backlight fading or burn-in like my 2011 model.
I've used 4 or 5 different revs of the U2412M and they're all different. Dell went from A02 to A07 over the course of 3 years. They fixed the insane AG coating very early on, and the newer models from 2016+ fixed the overshoot issue.

If you like the monitor and are still using A00/A01 I think you should swap it out to a new revision during a sale. It's very dated.
 
I almost pulled the trigger on two of these monitors on BF...for $150 each. I did not. And now I regret it. Sigh.
 
Just a heads up, you can score some insane deals on these monitors on Craigslist. I went from 1 to 5 for only $160 total (one was gifted by a friend). To get the 5th one up, does anyone know if 5 monitor surround is supported on a 1080 ti? If not I'm going to probably get a vega frontier edition.
 
I just got one, a Rev A10 made June 2019. I'm a little anxious about hooking it up, since I've heard it doesn't support auto aspect ratio swapping, I plan on playing a lot of old games on it in 1600x1200.....hoping the Nvidia Control Panel GPU scaling will save my hide, then.
 
GXE94 said:
I just got one, a Rev A10 made June 2019. I'm a little anxious about hooking it up, since I've heard it doesn't support auto aspect ratio swapping, I plan on playing a lot of old games on it in 1600x1200.....hoping the Nvidia Control Panel GPU scaling will save my hide, then.
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You mean scaling? None of mine do. I wanted to use a WiiU on mine a few years ago (1280x720) and it was all stretched. For PC gaming, Nvidia scaling works fine for any AR, as long as you select "GPU Scaling" in the control panel. I even got DSR working for 3840x2160 (16:9) using a custom DSR resolution editor.
 
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TaintedSquirrel said:
You mean scaling? None of mine do. I wanted to use a WiiU on mine a few years ago (1280x720) and it was all stretched. For PC gaming, Nvidia scaling works fine for any AR, as long as you select "GPU Scaling" in the control panel. I even got DSR working for 3840x2160 (16:9) using a custom DSR resolution editor.
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Yes, scaling. Basically I want my old games in 1600x1200 with letterboxing on the sides.
 
GXE94 said:
Yes, scaling. Basically I want my old games in 1600x1200 with letterboxing on the sides.
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Not sure if you'll ever see this, but this monitor does support 4:3 letterboxing. It just doesn't support 16:9 for whatever reason, so 1080 looks stretched. Funny that my October 2001 Dell can handle letterboxing of 16:9 but not this one. I play TFC in 1600x1200 on this monitor and it letterboxes correctly, you can just set the desktop res to 1600x1200 if the game bases off desktop res.

Good monitors overall, mine is a Rev A02 with a mfg date of July 2015. Great whites, acceptable blacks, very pleasant AG coating, still has great brightness. D-SUB seems like an afterthought on this monitor though as the noise level is quite high, even with it having mains power plug. Looks sharp via DVI and DisplayPort. Bummer that it can't scale 16:9 though.
 
uberwolf6688 said:
Not sure if you'll ever see this, but this monitor does support 4:3 letterboxing. It just doesn't support 16:9 for whatever reason, so 1080 looks stretched. Funny that my October 2001 Dell can handle letterboxing of 16:9 but not this one. I play TFC in 1600x1200 on this monitor and it letterboxes correctly, you can just set the desktop res to 1600x1200 if the game bases off desktop res.

Good monitors overall, mine is a Rev A02 with a mfg date of July 2015. Great whites, acceptable blacks, very pleasant AG coating, still has great brightness. D-SUB seems like an afterthought on this monitor though as the noise level is quite high, even with it having mains power plug. Looks sharp via DVI and DisplayPort. Bummer that it can't scale 16:9 though.
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This monitor lacks advanced scaler with large framebuffer and it is needed to add bars on top and bottom.
Adding bars on left and right is easier to do in hardware because it requires only as much memory to hold something like two lines worth of data (in reality it might have some more to do scaling but counted in lines, not frames!). While one line is received from input the processed/scaled line is sent to the panel, something like this. To add bars on top and bottom you would need to have enough memory to receive whole frame in to buffer while panel receives prepossessed data from different buffer. This memory is counted in megabytes and must be added as external DRAM chips increasing cost.

1920x1200 monitors with capability to display 1920x1080 with bars usually (if not always) have additional input lag. The added lag in 1080p of course makes some sense (though by clever engineering it could be really minimized to be much less than one frame!) but input lag at native resolution is only there because people who design monitor electronics didn't really care...

These days since things like input lag are universally reviewed and more and more people pay attention to sites which actually do measurements the scalers used in these monitors are better and at least not have input lag at native resolution. It is however just assumption that eg. 1080p on 2160p monitor doesn't have more lag. Reviewers do not test such things. If they did it might reveal interesting things.

This doesn't however matter on PC because GPUs can do their own scaling without adding input lag.
My recommendation is to always enable GPU scaling.
 
XoR_ said:
This monitor lacks advanced scaler with large framebuffer and it is needed to add bars on top and bottom.
Adding bars on left and right is easier to do in hardware because it requires only as much memory to hold something like two lines worth of data (in reality it might have some more to do scaling but counted in lines, not frames!). While one line is received from input the processed/scaled line is sent to the panel, something like this. To add bars on top and bottom you would need to have enough memory to receive whole frame in to buffer while panel receives prepossessed data from different buffer. This memory is counted in megabytes and must be added as external DRAM chips increasing cost.

1920x1200 monitors with capability to display 1920x1080 with bars usually (if not always) have additional input lag. The added lag in 1080p of course makes some sense (though by clever engineering it could be really minimized to be much less than one frame!) but input lag at native resolution is only there because people who design monitor electronics didn't really care...

These days since things like input lag are universally reviewed and more and more people pay attention to sites which actually do measurements the scalers used in these monitors are better and at least not have input lag at native resolution. It is however just assumption that eg. 1080p on 2160p monitor doesn't have more lag. Reviewers do not test such things. If they did it might reveal interesting things.

This doesn't however matter on PC because GPUs can do their own scaling without adding input lag.
My recommendation is to always enable GPU scaling.
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Thanks for the clarification on this, I was unaware of the technical aspect of this scaling. Being that this was a more budget IPS screen at the time I can see why it's lacking 16:9 scaling. GPU scaling does work great on this monitor, which is good for PC gaming. Wish that consoles could handle this too but they don't, and 16:10 is niche enough that the Xbox 360 seems to be the only console with native 16:10 support at 1680x1050.
 
I tried making scaler in FPGA so I analyzed the topic thoroughly.

In theory scaler needs only as much input lag as it takes it to draw black bars on top and bottom of the screen so ignoring blanking and synchronization lines it would be ~1.66ms at 60Hz to add black bars to 1080p on 1200p screen. Say 2-3ms to be on the safe side. The implementation would not be super complicated, it is just the matter of calculating when to start reading memory rather than waiting for v-sync to start drawing buffered frame. It would still takes quite a lot of memory, more than typical FPGA chip has.

As for Dell 2412M I was considering it at one point but Dell 2311H seemed like it should suit my needs better (console compatibility, ability to overclock to 75Hz or even 77Hz). Also early LED monitors didn't make good impression on me and 23 model had mature CCFL backlight made it safer bet. Though actually it seems they put proper LEDs on 2412M given 6500K preset has 255/255/255 for RGB colors for 6500K preset suggesting it didn't scream blue color at user :)

As for consoles: somehow M$ always had better monitor compatibility. Even the very first XBox you could use with normal VGA CRT vs PS2 which you could maybe in few games. Not directly but Component to VGA converters existed and 480p was an option for all games on og Xbox. X360 had VGA output and XOne/XS do support 1440p and even supports HDMI Freesync. SONY on the other hand...
Still, I do own PS5 and XSX is not even in my plans. Monitor solution for PS5 is actually very simple: get 4K HDMI 2.1 screen and wait for VRR support to be added... patiently 🙃
 
Yeah I've owned around a dozen of these (all different revisions) over the last many years, the only scaling that's ever worked is Nvidia's built-in GPU scaling.
Back when I owned AMD, their scaling didn't work at all, I assume it just tried to run through the monitor. Always had to play everything at 1920x1200 or in a window.

I also got 16:9 DSR to work by using a custom DSR resolution tool. By default, DSR only supports native AR.
 
Tipped a beer into a u2412m on Sunday.. OSD went bonkers. Unplugged for 24 hours and now it's back in the game 🍻
 
I am surprised my 3 from 2011 are still as good as the day I unboxed them. Black Friday special on them a few months after release. Cant justify an upgrade with these working perfectly fine though I would like a higher refresh rate.
 
Ripskin said:
I am surprised my 3 from 2011 are still as good as the day I unboxed them. Black Friday special on them a few months after release. Cant justify an upgrade with these working perfectly fine though I would like a higher refresh rate.
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If it's the original anti-glare models it's worth upgrading just to get rid of the "sandpaper" screens.
My U2212 secondary monitor is one of the original 2011/2012 models and it's god awful to look at.
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
If it's the original anti-glare models it's worth upgrading just to get rid of the "sandpaper" screens.
My U2212 secondary monitor is one of the original 2011/2012 models and it's god awful to look at.
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I'm pretty sure they are. Got mine black Friday 2011 (had to confirm with this thread when I posted after getting them in December lol). They have not been too bad for me in that regard as I mostly use them in lower light situations. Though in the sun it does look a bit eh. But still, for 900~1000 dollars these 3 screens are no worse for wear after a decade of heavy usage.
 
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