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HDTV & Dell's Ultrasharp 2005

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Gawd
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Nov 27, 2004
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I am interested in how our 2005's handle an HDTV signal? Has anyone tried hooking it up to a source yet? I as many of you aren't very thrilled about the quality of DVD on these monitors, but that is due to the resolutions of a DVD video scaled up to fit on the higher resolutions of our monitors. Knowing that HDTV has a much higher resolution, I wonder how well it looks.

I am seriously thinking of getting another one while this Delf deal is still around. (I think it expires 1-5-2005?). I currently have a small 13" TV that is from the 80's ... It is obviously on it's last leg and I have been looking to replace it for several months. I have been reading up on OTA HDTV (Over the air High Definition TV) because we still have an old VHF/UHF large antenna in our attic. Apparently HDTV is broadcast over the UHF spectrum and our old antenna should have no problem receiving it. All we need is a receiver/decoder and an HDTV ready source (TV or this monitor perhaps) So rather then waste money on a new cheep small TV for my desk, I was thinking of the ideal setup of 2 Ultrasharps, Monitor 1 will be fed via DVI from the pc and Monitor 2 from the other VGA out of the pc to the VGA in of the 2nd Monitor ... also, the DVI on the 2nd monitor will be hooked up to the HDTV receiver/decoder. So monitor 1 will be my primary display for my pc, and monitor 2 will be my secondary display in the dual monitor setup. Now if I want to watch HDTV, toggle the input selector over to DVI on the second monitor.

Did I loose anyone? I tried to be as descriptive as I could. The point of this topic is: "How well does this monitor handle HDTV". Pics would be preferred/nessessary if you can. After seeing some of the setups in the Home Theater thread, I have to believe someone has an HDTV setup to test this out.

Thanks for the input.

B
 
I didn't think you could hook up a regular monitor DVI's input to the output of a set top box and work....maybe I'm wrong.


Mac
 
Current hdtv cable tuners have dvi out so it may be possible
 
I was writing up a review of mine. I'll throw out the HDTV section. This is not complete. So far I've just watched a few sample scenes from HBO-HD and half a Monday Night Football game.

HDTV works pretty well on this thing. I'm currently running an HDTV receiver to it and am fairly happy with the picture. I happen to be running component out through a Key Digital CTCA-2 transcoder to the VGA input (since my computer is going into the DVI).

I think there's really three big areas of concern for HDTV use:

Ghosting/Blurring
I define ghosting as seeing trails being moving objects and blurring as loss of "focus" or definition of moving objects. I don't see ghosting in normal viewing. Blurring is noticeable if you look for it, in particular I see it on long football passes or kickoffs. However this is must better than my old Dell 1800FP in the same setup.

Color/Calibration/Contrast
At least in my case color is adequate. This thing is so insanely bright by default that I've had to reduce all of the color levels by half. This was necessary for both the DVI (computer) and VGA (HDTV receiver) inputs. Without doing this even lighter grays are getting clipped to white (when viewing the HDNet test pattern: clipped through "3" on a 1-10 gray level ramp). As a side note DVI does not have a contrast adjustment.

Obviously without a calibration tool I can't get color perfect. As is color is decent - better than my 1800FP, but not as good as my Sony CRT HD RPTV or Sanyo PLV-Z1 projector.

As far as perceived contrast ratio, I'd put this below the CRT RPTV and above the PLV-Z1 (white room which kills projector contrast ratio). I'm definitely happy with this aspect.

I've not had a chance to evaluate black level and contrast on darker movies. I do have a small amount of backlight bleedthrough in all four corners.

Positioning was a pain. 480p, 720p, 1080i each required separating massaging to get them oriented on the screen correctly.

Of course this whole section is a big YMMV depending on whether you go through DVI, straight VGA, or a different transcoder.


Scaling
First off, I'm personally not very bothered by scaling artifacts - little jaggies aren't that bad when you grew up on the Atari 2600, NES, etc. The 2005FPW does an adequate job of scaling 1280x720 to 1680x1050. At ~24" from the screen I can definitely see some scaling artifacts on sharp edges: football helmets for example. It's not that they're ragged stairsteps: it's just that the edges are a bit less smooth than 1:1. However this doesn't bother me when I'm not looking for it. I'm happy with the performance relative to my 1800FP.

As a side benefit I was pretty happy with a quick initial look at XBox 480p scaling as well. This was a step up from my 1800FP.

I've not had a chance to really sit down and watch 1080i yet. Yes that's right I did see 1080i working on this display (which was shocking to me). The 2005FPW OSD menu showed 1920x1080 @ 30hz. I have no idea whether it is de-interlacing (unlikely) or just sampling down to 540p. At some point I'll run the HDNet resolution test which should point to which method it is using. In this mode the image was shifted to the left by about an inch, like 720p was. I didn't yet bother to mess with the OSD to fix this and really look at this mode.

Ideally I'll figure out some way to host some scaling pictures since I think they'd be valuable. No guarantees though. Hopefully this was some help. If you're still on the fence you might just want to try it out and see. Chances are you'll get some small bit of backlight and can return it for free if you don't like it.

Edit: fixed some HTML bolding.
 
I may be wrong, but aren't there 2 different types of dvi connectors? One for pc hookup, the other for hdtv? I remember reading something on the dell support forums about this. A guy had bought a dell lcd tv. It had a dvi hookup, but he could not get an image when hooked up to his hdtv decoder through dvi. Dell's response was that the dvi port could only accept pc signals. I think one of the types is dvi-d. Maybe someone could clarify this?
 
There are three basic types of DVI connectors:

-DVI-D: digital
-DVI-A: analog
-DVI-I: both analog and digital

See DVI Google Search for more info.

Consumer electronics or computers can use any of the above. I can confirm that my HD receiver's DVI-D worked with my 1800FP. I've not yet tried it on my 2005FPW since at the moment it would require a 60' DVI cable.

Of course all bets are off if you are trying to display HDCP protected material. I don't expect that the 2005FPW's DVI input would be HDCP compliant. Currently I don't believe any providers have turned on HDCP.

As a side note there are differences between the definition of black between computer and video. However this is a quality issue as opposed to a display issue. In my case the last shade of gray on the HDNet test pattern is clipped to black.

Here is a very good post/thread on the above two: AVSForum DVI Format discussion
 
For the life of me I can't get my cable box to work with the 2005, I've tried both a DVI-I and DVI-D cable and neither will get a signal through. Did you have to set anything up with your HD box before hooking it up?
 
For mine I just hooked up the DVI to the 1800FP and it worked. I did have to have the HDTV receiver outputting 720p since the 1800FP wouldn't sync to 1080i.

You're cable box might have some sort of menu setting or switch to enabled DVI vs. component (or it could even have DVI disabled).

It's also possible that your cable box's DVI requires a display that supports HDCP copy protection, which I doubt the 2005FPW does. This also might be configurable on your cable box.

You also might searching here.

Edit: added some other options.
 
...bump, cause the second one is on it's way! ;)

and I am still interested in more input. Thanks to all you who responded so far. Very helpful start. Now that this thing is in more homes, I am curious who else has tried hooking up an HDTV stream to it.
 
Just curious, has anyone tried hooking this up with a pci hdtv tuner like the ati hdtv wonder?
 
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