It's a whole new world..
Written: Jul 18 '02 (Updated Jul 19 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great image quality, flat screen, comprehensive controls.
Cons: None I have found.
The Bottom Line: An excellent 17" CRT display for either personal of business use.
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| luclin999's Full Review: Dell P780 17 inch CRT Monitor |
For the longest time I was one of those people who refused to upgrade a computer component until it was either so obsolete it just couldn't run anything anymore or until it died outright.
Thus, I had been using my old 15" NEC monitor for the past 5 years and despite the huge price drops monitors have seen over the years I stuck with it until last month when it powered on for the last time.
After looking around at a few monitors I settled on the Dell P780 and I couldn't be happier.
Getting it home
First off, this is not a lightweight monitor. At 42 pounds it takes a bit of effort to get it out of the box and set it up.
Once I had it up and plugged into my computer I powered things up and I was shocked..
The difference between this screen and what I had been using was simply amazing.
Screen clarity.
I have a lamp in my den which sits behind my computer and when someone is sitting there using it to read, it used to cast a nasty reflection on my screen. It was something that I just learned to live with. But the P780's glare coating reduces this on my screen by 80% or more from what I was used to.
This monitor uses Trinitron technology and it shows every time the monitor is turned on. Basically, this means that the monitor uses a 0.24 mm minimum aperture grill within the screen to insure a crisp delivery of every pixel.
The image quality on first power-up was quite good. Very little flicker or fuzziness. After I went into my properties menu and set the monitor type to Dell P780 and adjusted the refresh rate to "optimal" all trace of flicker disappeared. In 1024x768 mode text quality was excellent as well. But despite all of this I wanted to see just what this monitor could do.
I decided to verify the monitor's convergence (the alignment of the red, blue and green guns in the monitor and how well they align when rendering pixels) by going to this Web Site:
http://www.scarse.org/adjust/convergence.html
..and checking the way the images appeared. While they were very close there was a slight variance in the alignment and so going into the monitor's own menu I adjusted the guns until the settings were as close to perfect as I could set them.
Looking at some text in Word after that was incredible. Now, my documents look better on my screen than they do when printed out.
Options, tools and specs.
The monitor offers a fairly comprehensive list of user adjustable features, these include:
Brightness
Contrast
Size/centering
Color (9300k/5000k)
Convergence
Language (for menu display: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and several others I can't translate :)
Degauss
Moire
and the ability to adjust where the on screen display is shown on screen.
All of these work quite well and enabled me to adjust the settings exactly to my preferences.
Specifications:
CRT size and type
17" Trinitron
Viewable image size
16.0"
Dot pitch/Aperture grille pitch (mm)
.24-.25mm
Horizontal scan range (kHZ)
30 - 85kHz
Vertical scan range (Hz)
48-120Hz
Emission Compliance
MPR-II and TCO 99'
Power Management Compliance
Energy Star, Nutek
Plug and Play Support
yes
Manageability Support
yes
Digital controls
yes
RGB color adjustment
yes
Moiré cancel
yes
Optimal resolution
1024x768@85Hz
Maximum resolution
1600x1200@60Hz
Color
Pearl White
Dimensions (HxWxD)
16.4x15.9x16.5"
Weight
41.38lbs
The monitor came with a one year warranty on parts and labor.
The only real fault I found with this monitor it that the video cable is integrated and not detachable. So, if the cable breaks down at some point I will have to send in the whole monitor to be serviced.
One other thing to note. The monitor automatically goes through a degauss cycle every time it is turned on. Due to this, I would avoid placing floppy disks, credit cards or other fragile magnetic media near the monitor.
Overall, I am extremely happy with this purchase. The quality of the display is everything I could ask for and now I am left lamenting all those years I spent giving myself eyestrain staring at my old NEC.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 179
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
luclin999
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Member: Leo Monaghan
Location: Houston, TX USA
Reviews written: 34
Trusted by: 20 members
About Me:
42 year old techie living in Houston, TX
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