My Dell Monitor Quest is Over: I Finally Have Three Perfect 2407WFP Monitors

[Jason Dunn]

http://www.jasondunn.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/dell-2407wfp-perfection.jpg

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 (http://www.jasondunn.com) 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 (http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/index.php?topic_id=10882) 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 (http://www.jasondunn.com/another-sad-dell-monitor-story-95) (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 (http://www.jasondunn.com/the-moment-of-truth-109). 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 (http://www.jasondunn.com/mercy-dell-mercy-116), 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 (http://www.jasondunn.com/dell-monitor-quest-over-164) - 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 (http://www.jasondunn.com/technoogy-life-on-hold-152) but I relented and am using one temporarily attached to my laptop (http://www.jasondunn.com/i-couldnt-resist-any-longerfirst-2407wfp-set-up-169). The battle continues - but at least I have my monitors. ;-)

(I also learnt something new about Dell offering discounts to keep products (http://www.jasondunn.com/returning-products-to-dell-i-discovered-something-new-139).)

[Felix Torres]

Hook up the 360 and fire up Gears of War. ;-)

[Jason Dunn]

Hook up the 360 and fire up Gears of War. ;-)

Hrm. Perhaps. 8)

[bleeman]

I guess I was very lucky. I ordered a 2407WFP back in early December while at the Dell Store in one of our local malls. It arrived about 5 days later and is perfect. I wasn't aware there were any issues with this model until I saw your note here. I did some checking at the Dell Forums and discovered people there are looking for the A04 revision as there's apparently some issue with the 1:1 aspect ratio option when it comes to using this monitor with some video consoles like the 360 with A03 and earlier. Mine is an A03 rev and the only video game system I have is a PSP so it's a moot point for me. I just thought I'd mention it in case you weren't aware of it so you could check yours out.

Now having said mine was perfect, today I hooked up the S-video input to the S-video output on my DirecTV TIVO unit and I'm disappointed in the picture quality. It looks all "smeary" (Don't you just love those big technical terms :) ) like a video does when you do something like Full Screen in WMP with something set for 240x320 or 640x480. I was expecting a nice clean picture. Is there some setting I might have wrong or is there something wrong with the monitor?

[Jason Dunn]

Now having said mine was perfect, today I hooked up the S-video input to the S-video output on my DirecTV TIVO unit and I'm disappointed in the picture quality. It looks all "smeary" (Don't you just love those big technical terms :) ) like a video does when you do something like Full Screen in WMP with something set for 240x320 or 640x480.

What you're seeing is the result of two issues:

1) You're taking (I assume) a standard definition cable signal at 720 x 480 and pumping it out to a monitor that is natively 1920 x 1200. That means it has to scale the image upward, exactly like Windows Media Player does. Sometimes this looks "ok" (a DVD for instance), but over S-Video and relying only on the scaler in the monitor...not so much, as you're seeing. There's really nothing you can do about this.

2) S-Video is a poor way to transmit signals. Does your TIVO unit have component (red, blue, green)? Try that instead.