I recently splurged and purchased a Dell 2405FPW 23 inch monitor. The (possibly spurious) justification was that it would improve my development productivity by having more real estate. Maybe the real justification was subliminal and relates to all modern movies/TV shows for the last 3 years or so showing all desktops having large thin flat panel monitors all over the place. The existing monitor was a 17” run at 1280x1024. Coming out of the box, the 23” flat panel it didn’t actually look that big. Once it was up an running on the desk displaying the windows desktop, it looked huge. This probably due to the bulk of the CRT hardware screwing up my perceptions of size.
The only real problem I had was that it is way too bright. All the controls are wound back to the minimums for the monitor, yet it still was searing my eyes when the monitor was displaying programs with mostly white backgrounds. I eventually found a setting on the ATI catalyst software to wind back the brightness and contrast to be more comfortable. The controls are under the color properties in the graphic settings. Control “all channels” and then adjust the brightness and contrast to suit.
The multiple inputs were handy this week to test a laptop that was going to be used in a presentation scenario. The Dell monitor acted as the equivalent of the LCD projector to be used at the actual presentation. The main PC was hooked up via a DVI connection. The laptop then had its external monitor plug connected to the standard D-SUB connector. I could easily then switch between the inputs using the buttons on the front of the Dell monitor. This set up help identify that a video play scenario worked on the laptop screen, but ended up as a blank space on the external monitor. The hardware acceleration had to be wound back on the laptop to appear on the external monitor. Identifying this in the office, just made the presentation setup less stressful than it would have been.
The extra width in the aspect ratio for the screen takes a bit of getting used to. I’ve ended up putting the Windows task bar on the left of the screen instead of the bottom. The task bar now has enough width to display more of the titles of the apps running and enough height to list a heap of them. Working with Word in two page display mode is quite handy as well. I’m still playing around with the window layout in Visual Studio 2005 to see what works best. HD videos look fantastic – though I’ll rarely use it for full screen video display. All in all, a good purchase.