Thoughts on Adjusting a New Monitor
Yesterday, I took delivery of a new monitor: a Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP 24-inch Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor with Height Adjustable Stand. (Yes, that’s a long name, and lots of capital letters…) It replaces a 5-year old Apple 20″ monitor, which was given to me by a friend a bit less than two years ago. There’s nothing wrong with the Apple monitor; it will last several more years. I just wanted a bigger screen, and couldn’t justify the cost of a 30″, so I settled for a 24″ compromise.
The differences between the Dell and the Apple monitor are interesting. Aside from the actual unit – one having an Apple logo, the other having a Dell logo – the Dell has a much more practical stand. While the Apple just sits there, the Dell can turn, go higher or lower, and even pivot into portrait mode (though I doubt I’ll be using that). The stand technology is far superior to the old Apple; I haven’t seen Apple’s more recent monitors to compare, but I don’t think the current Apple’s have a height-adjustable stand.
In terms of the actual display, one of the main things to consider with an LCD is the viewing angle. My old Apple has an excellent viewing angle; there is hardly any distortion or color shift when looking at it even from a 45-degree angle. The Dell is pretty close, with barely noticeable distortion both horizontally and vertically. (Compare this with Apple’s current iMac displays, which have truly terrible viewing angles.)
But setting up a new monitor is not as simple as just plugging it in. Dell monitors are calibrated to work with Windows PCs out of the box, and the color settings are far from optimal. Naturally, you can use the Displays preference pane, and its Color tab, to calibrate a monitor to fit your eyes. It took four run-throughs, and some adjustments of the monitor’s own settings (brightness and contrast) to get it right, but now it’s quite good. While most of those adjustments involve getting colors to look right, there are a couple of things that are worth noting if you’re not happy with your monitor’s display. First, the Dell doesn’t have very good contrast. Even twiddling with its own contrast setting didn’t help much. The solution to this is to increase the gamma setting at the end of the calibration procedure; I put mine pretty near the max, because I like the way it makes things look. (Bear in mind that many of these settings also depend on what you are used to from a monitor, so you’ll spend some time trying to make your new monitor look like your old one.) Another thing is that the Dell, out of the box, doesn’t provide excellent font display. This has something to do with its “sharpness” setting, which, curiously, can only be tweaked at four settings. It has a bar from 1 to 100, but only changes by intervals of 25, whereas all the other settings can be changed in intervals of 1. With sharpness at 50, there were slight haloes around fonts, especially at the side of the screen. I resolved this by setting Font Smoothing Style to Strong in the Appearance preference pane. By default, Macs set font smoothing to Medium when a flat panel is connected. Since the monitor’s sharpness made the fonts look think, this change makes them look perfect.
The only complaint I have about this monitor is that I cannot change its brightness from the keyboard like I could with the Apple monitor. I have sensitive eyes, and don’t like the screen to be very bright, so I tend to change the brightness during the day: in the morning, it’s bright (for me, that means 15 out of 100; this is a very bright monitor). As the sun goes down, I turn the brightness down, here to 0 (which doesn’t mean that the backlight is off; that gives you an idea of how bright it is).
But aside from the brightness issue, I’m quite happy. This monitor was substantially cheaper than an equivalent Apple display, and, while it’s more expensive than some other 24″ screens (and even another Dell model), the reviews I read said it was greatly superior in quality, something I can attest to.
And I even got quite a discount from Dell. When I called to ask about the warranty (it’s a 3-year on-site exchange warranty, with zero dead pixels), the person asked if I wanted to order, and I said I was looking around, and the price was a bit high. They immediately offered me a 20% discount, and, seeing that their prices were flexible, I got them down to about a 27% reduction.
All in all, this was a good purchase, and it will be fine for a few years. I may want to graduate to a larger monitor then, but I may not. I have amblyopia, and only see from one eye, and the wider the monitor, the more I have to turn my head. So a 30″ screen might actually too big for me. (That’s also why I didn’t buy two 20″ screens.) But, for now, I’ve got just what I needed: more work space.
