Know what that's a picture of? Three flawless 24" Dell monitors. That's the good news. The bad news is that it took me 12 monitors ordered to find three perfect ones. I kept track of this ugly scenario on my
personal blog rather than bore Digital Media Thoughts readers with the details, but now that I have the monitors I thought a wrap-up post here would be appropriate.
This saga started back in August when I
ordered three 2407WFP monitors and ended up returning them because all three had a well-documented colour banding problem. I figured I'd wait a few months and see if Dell ever fixed the problems. On December 15th, Dell had the 24" monitors on sale for $699 CAD, $200 off the normal price. I ordered three. On December 27th I unpacked the three Dell monitors that had arrived, and
all three were defective (one badly so). I phoned Dell and arranged for a return. I then ordered three more.
On January 3rd I received the next batch of three monitors, and only
one of the three were good. The one good monitor looked amazing! Getting one good monitor out of nine total ordered inspired me to
try yet again by ordering two more monitors, only this time it was a few minutes after the $699 sale was over so I had to convince a Dell sales rep that I deserved to get the sale price again because of all the trouble I was having. The monitors took a very long time to be produced, but I was hoping they were coming from the non-bad-LCD-panel factory that Dell uses for special occasions like this one. ;-)
Finally, a few days ago (Jan. 23rd) I
received the next two monitors - and both of them were perfect. I now have three perfectly flawless 2407WFP monitors from Dell. The sad part is that
I don't have anything to plug them into but I relented and am using one
temporarily attached to my laptop. The battle continues - but at least I have my monitors. ;-)
(I also learnt something new about
Dell offering discounts to keep products.)