Dell U2410 Monitor

[Harrison]

Dell make some of the best monitors at the moment (finally something Dell are good at! ). You should be very happy with that, and as you say, it has loads of different inputs for everything you can think of.

I was just wondering, as it has composite you could even use it with an Amiga 600/1200 and the VGA input for the higher modes might also be possible. Can you try it out with an Amiga and see how the image looks?

[Stephen Coates]

I certainly will try it. I doubt it will be as good as, say, a CM8833, but hopefully it will work fine.

Also, my college lecturer revealed today that he has an Amiga .

[Stephen Coates]

It arrived the other day .

This 1920x1200 resolution is rather large. It also still looks quite thin, so I expect a Full HD monitor must seem quite a bit worse.

It does have a bit of input lag and the response time isn't fantastic. These are both clearly worse than my Sony CRT. The same with black levels, unless you are displaying a contrasty screen, black is quite visible.

I think it would still be fine for games. It does have a dedicated game mode, which removes some of the processing which is done to the image, thus improving response times.

Full HD video looks fine, and I have plugged my VCR and PVRs into the composite input to use it as a big telly. It does well at this. Only downside is that changing the aspect ratio etc involves going through quite a few menus. The IPS panel does of course mean that it has good viewing angles.

It is a wide gamut display, so will display Adobe RGB, but I have used it in sRGB mode, which has been fine. Colours are good and as far as I can tell, look accurate (a bit different to my CRT, but that wasn't calibrated).

The only downsides I can think of at the moment are the touch sensitive buttons which control the menus. These are cool, but can become quite annoying, and the fact that the display is slightly pinker on the right hand side. Apparently such issues are common. I doubt you would notice it unless your eyes are very good at spotting minor differences (like mine).

It will also rotate 90 degrees to make a 1200x1920 display. This is also cool (if a bit strange), and could be much more useful than I thought it might be.

Not tried it on the Amiga yet, but I will post some photos as soon as I do. The composite video isn't fantastic, but then you are simply upscaling an already low resolution and low quality signal, so I doubt the Amiga will be fantastic on it.

[Demon Cleaner]

Btw, why didn't you buy the newer U2412 monitor, it's cheaper. Don't know what it has less than the older model though?

[Harrison]

I wonder what the differences are. Probably not much for such a small model number difference.

You do have to be careful sometimes though. For example with Iiyama monitors I noticed their were 4 different models of the same size but with very slightly different modem names, HDS on the end, another with HDS1 or and another with just HD. Looking closely at the specs revealed some models were missing some input ports, others had additional ports etc... but the actual display panel was the same across all of them.

[Stephen Coates]

Btw, why didn't you buy the newer U2412 monitor, it's cheaper. Don't know what it has less than the older model though?

I did consider it, particularly because it is cheaper, but I decided against it mainly because of the inputs. The 2412 lacks lots of the inputs that the 2410 has. I think the only other major differences are that the 2412 is LED as opposed to CCFL (not bothered about this), and doesn't have a wide gamut panel (again, not too bothered by this as I use the 2410 in sRGB mode, but having Adobe RGB could come in handy I suppose).

[Harrison]

OK, so the newer version has a better panel (LED backlight and wider gamut), but less inputs. So you get a better image, but compromise on connectability. Always annoying when they do that, especially as I would always be swayed by Adobe RGB.

[Stephen Coates]

Not quite Harrison. The newer one has the standard gamut panel, whereas the 2410 has the wide gamut panel.