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This journal discusses photography in all its guises with an emphasis on the art of making photographs.
You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Dell 2209WA monitor”.
Posted in Displays
That looks like a good buy – it’s around £200 in the UK. Whilst I’m very happy with my HP2475W (costing twice as much!) I have found that colour calibration is an issue. Out of the box the colour settings are way off and the screen is far too bright. I’m still not convinced I have good calibration (I use an Eye One). The reds seem too intense and the colour difference between the HP and the iMac screen is quite marked. I’d be interested to hear how the Dell performed out of the box and how the colour matches up with the Apple screen, from your screen shots it looks very close.
Roy – I work in a very bright room, preferring to do my processing in the early afternoon, sitting with a window behind me. Thus, I tend to have the brightness and contrast turned up pretty high – 80+ out of 100 – or the screen washes out. In my setting the calibration out of the box was pretty close to my (Monaco Optix XR profiled) iMac 24″. I did a simple match-by-eye of a photo with lots of flesh tones and got dead close by using the RBG color setting and varying the R, G and B sliders, plus tweaks of the contrast and brightness.
In the pictures you can just make out that the iMac is a tad pinker – the Dell is more accurately profiled, in my opinion, but I have yet to do this with a colorimeter. Then again, this sort of direct, side by side comparison, is extremely critical and revealing of differences, so I doubt a colorimeter will do much better as I already know how my screen images from the iMac translate to prints on the HP DJ90 – slightly too pink!
I don’t know how it would be in the darkened room preferred by many photographers, but in my environment it works well.
The 2209 does not have 1:1 pixel matching, meaning video will not necessarily play in the right aspect ratio, so if watching movies on your computer is a requirement this would not be a good choice.
By the way, I did not notice any temperature increase in my graphics chip or related heat sink when using the dual monitor setup – my iMac started life with the nVidia 7300 GPU but, as set forth here earlier, I upgraded that to the nVidia 7600 when the original fried. However, I do use two very large external fans to blow cool air into the iMac though the holes I drilled in the back, so I’m uncertain if this is an objective statement.
I dont own this dell tft, but I read when you choose 4:3 ratio with your video card, the dell will have 1:1 pixel matching in smaller resolutions and show black bars.
Jonny – I read that too but in a Mac you do not ‘choose’ aspect ratios. It’s automatic. So the only time you see black bars on the screen is when you play 4:3 movies (bars at the side) or 2.55:1 ultra-widescreen movies (bars top and base) which is as it should be to avoid edits or distortion to the original.
Most movies, of course, are 16:9 meaning they fit the Dell’s screen fully with no bars anywhere. Anyway, for Mac users it’s a non-issue. I cannot speak for Windows as I don’t own it. As for using lower resolutions, why would anyone want to do that?