2408WFP: Pulled The Trigger

The Sony G500 CRT that I bought refurbished off of uBid in probably 2000 or 2001 (Nick bought one at the time, too) had been going downhill in recent months: when coming back from power save mode, it would take several minutes to fade to full brightness. Just as annoying, the image would jiggle until reaching full brightness (at which point it would lock).

It was a good monitor in its day, but it didn't owe me anything at this point. Plus, it is huge: I had to keep it on the corner of an L shaped desk, as it was so deep that I could not fit the monitor and the keyboard on a non-corner section.

I wanted to finally get a nice flat panel. Given that I'd likely have it for years, I thought it would be justified to get something nicer than the super-discount-of-the-week TN-based unit. The Dell 240x series has always been well regarded, and so I was looking at the 2407 and 2407-HC (the wide gamut version of the 2407). They apparently have some ghosting issues, however. I had friends with 2405's, but nobody with a 2407. Dell then announced a 2408 at CES in January, so I thought I'd wait until it went up for sale and the reviews started pouring in.

It's taken a while, but it finally became generally available in the past few weeks. It's an S-PVA panel (like the previous 240x units), with some evolutionary improvements in its capabilities (spec sheet here). The forum posts that started popping up were generally pretty positive: it seemed very well rounded, with a lack of the obvious ghosting some found in the 2407-HC. The one complaint is that it has pretty substantial display lag (40-50 ms), but this won't bother a non-gamer like me.

I finally decided to get one after finding the first large review heavy on quantitatives here. I ordered it while in Japan, and it showed up even before I got back. Despite picking free 3-5 day shipping, it was delivered at my house the following day. I'm typing on it now. Next up: figuring out if my Latitude D620 is actually limited to only 1600x1200 on DVI, as its specs seem to suggest (1600x1200 DVI, 2048x1536 analog). This would be annoying, as this panel's target resolution is 1920x1200 (driving that via analog now).