MONITOR REVIEW

Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW review

7.2

Editors' Rating

Jeffrey Fuchs CNET

Published: 08 Feb 2005

The Dell 2005FPW belongs to an ever-growing family of enormous wide-screen LCDs that includes the ViewSonic VP201b. These wide displays are perfect for juggling multiple windows or working with extremely wide (or long) documents and spreadsheets. Manufacturers of these extra-wide LCDs hope to tempt graphics professionals, video editors, gamers and movie fans by including extra features such as video-input ports, PIP (picture-in-picture), PBP (picture-by-picture) capabilities and extra USB ports. The £499 (ex. VAT) Dell 2005FPW has all of the above, and its image quality is more than good enough for most business uses. Plus, when you emerge from the mass of open windows and spreadsheets on your desktop, you can enjoy a movie in the PIP window.

The first thing you'll notice about the Dell 2005FPW's design is its extreme width-to-height ratio. The display area is 17in. (43cm) wide and just less than 11in. (28cm) tall, giving the display an image aspect ratio of 16:10. This shape is great for DVD watching or looking at two A4-size images side by side. By contrast, architects, designers, or anyone else who needs to view an enormously long vertical image (such as that of legal documents) need only rotate the panel to portrait mode. The 2005FPW's looks are bland, though the sparkly, matte-silver plastic stand and trim add a touch of panache. The bezel is matte black along the top and the sides, shiny black along the bottom, and it measures a svelte 2cm wide all the way around.

For its size, the 2005FPW is quite adjustable. In landscape mode, the neck telescopes 13cm and in Portrait mode, it telescopes about 9cm to bring the panel to a towering height of 60cm. The 2005FPW is slightly wobble-prone, but you can make the unit more stable by locking the display into place at its lowest height. The screen tilts 5 degrees forward and 20 degrees back, and it swivels 40 degrees to the left and the right. A pair of cupped, thick rubber panels hold cables in place at the base of the neck. This system works well unless the cables become twisted around each other; if that happens, it's easy to accidentally unplug the power cord when pivoting the panel.

The 2005FPW has both digital and analogue inputs, as well as S-Video and composite video ports. One downstream and four upstream ports make connecting peripherals straightforward. Speakers and a headphone jack don't come standard, but you can add both with Dell's AS500 Sound Bar. Picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture functionality allow you multitask -- or play and work at the same time.

One feature the Dell 2005FPW could use is bundled pivoting software. The user guide CD-ROM has detailed information about which graphics cards are best for rotating the operating system and what to do with other graphics cards, and it points users to the Dell's Web site for updated drivers. However, it would be much nicer if the 2005FPW came with easy-to-use pivoting software like Portrait Displays' PivotPro.

The Dell 2005FPW turned in a solid performance on our DisplayMate-based image-quality tests. Text is clear, sharp, and easy to read. The greyscale tests show a bright white at the high-intensity end of the scale and a decent black at the low-intensity end, although we saw some compression on the dark end. We saw some greenish tints in the mid-range, but they were not pronounced. Screen uniformity tests show the 2005FPW to be slightly brighter in the corners than in the centre, and some colours, most noticeably red, look slightly pale in the lower corners of the screen. The 2005FPW did not fare very well on our DVD and gaming tests. We saw lots of noise, as well as streaking and ghosting, but the details were generally good.

The Dell 2005FPW comes with a three-year warranty, and technical support is available from Dell for the life of the warranty. There is no printed user guide, but the manual on CD-ROM is sufficient. Dell's Web site offers online support in the form of answers to FAQs, a searchable knowledge base, troubleshooting tips and downloads and upgrades.