(Dell monitors on Wikipedia)
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Dell 24″ Widescreen UltraSharp 2405FPW Flat Panel Monitor

It seems this display was replaced by the 2407FPW. (See Dell 2407WFPb)

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At some point I ended up breaking it.. :(
2007-04-16 — This supplemented my Dell 2407WFPb
2006-02-03 – Well it seems that the USB hub in my Dell 2405FPW is perfectly fine. PCLinuxOS‘ USB subsystem was sent into panic for reasons unknown. I did an update and a reboot and things are working again. Go figure. =/
2006-01-23 — I’m having an extended-length misadventure my Dell 2405FPW. Apparently it is to blame for my recent USB issues.
- I was having problems with my Dell DJ Ditty not being detected and mounted, and also with /var filling up mysteriously. It turns out that the USB system was crashing and throwing bunches of error messages blindly. All sorts of funky issues ensued.
- After all kinds of tests, I can narrow it down to the USB hub in the display. Nothing else is at fault.. except perhaps the crashing kernel.
- All this I probably learned last Thursday (2006-01-19).. but for some weird reason I don’t always think to write this nonsense down. Hrm.
I got a free printer when I bought this, a Dell 720.
2005-11-10 — Previously owned a Viewsonic 17GA
2005-11-10 — Bought from Dell for $1,254.50

Table of Contents [hide]

1 My review
- 1.1 Troubleshooting
  - 1.1.1 Reducing the brightness
2 Accessories
3 Reviews
4 Linux notes
5 2005-12-27

My review ∞

1920×1200 native (WUXGA), 12ms average 16 rise and fall (black to white), contrast unknown, ratio 16:10. Looks fantastic even at that uber-high resolution.
- I didn’t need to fiddle with font sizes at all. Things are a bit bright, and there is a glow to some sharp there was a small text because of my glasses but that’s understandable.
Built-in USB hub (4 ports)
card reader (5 types: MMC, SD, compactFlash, and others I don’t know).
Height, pivot, swivel, and tilt adjustments. No pivoting software.
- Pivoting won’t be possible without extra-long cables, depending on where your computer is positioned. =/
Good blacks.
Great price, good features.. but not perfect.
Seamlessly and instantly adapts to other resolutions. It’s does it perfectly.
- There is no jittery “auto-adjust in progress”.. the screen just comes up the right way every time. And boy do things look fantastic. I mean.. even the initial bootup looks great in textmode. Just great.
Reportedly not amazing with traditional video input, but computer/digital is nice.
.27 dot pitch
Brightness of 500cd/m2
22.1 lbs

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The USB connections on the left side of the screen are backwards. So plugging in my mp3 player faces it away from me.

Troubleshooting ∞

Changing video sources can be frustrating, because the display will go to sleep when it does not receive input. So if I have a video game hooked up, and I turn the game off then attend to the display to change the video back to my computer’s source.. it will take a moment to wake up before switching to the next display.

The USB switchbox stuff has had a history of issues on some PCLinuxOS versions after 0.85 until around 0.92 .. I haven’t tested PCLinuxOS 2007-test3.

Reducing the brightness ∞

This display is so ridiculously bright that I had to change the colour preferences to “user”, reduce the colour settings and then reduce the brightness setting. Changing the gamma in X didn’t help. I set my colour settings to 15/29/19.

Then I reduced the brightness to 0.

I recommend over-reducing the “user” colour settings and then raising the brightness a little, to make it easy to adjust the brightness later.

Accessories ∞

Moview MV17DC Elite LCD Monitor Arm For 17″-23″
- Can handle a 25lb monitor, so it’s fine.
- Remember that the display isn’t like a 24″ LCD panel since it’s 24″ on the diagonal.
- This is a good thing to have, but it isn’t easy to move around and definitely won’t sit very well in certain positions. Once you have a good position in mind, it’s perfect. You do have to mount it using the screws and mounts which come with the display. It’s very easy to mount, and very easy to put on your desk. My desk has a piece of tempered glass on top, which scared me at first but it turns out to work just fine with this.
Moview Wall Mount Bracket for MV15DC/MV17DC Monitor Arm
- It’s a tiny little thing. I might use it one day later.

Reviews ∞

Linux notes ∞

First of all, the bad news. The monitor does not like “vga=6” in /etc/lilo.conf (and probably not in GRUB either).

Yes, the LCD monitor does work “automagically”. I hooked up via the DVI connector and put it through its paces. At first, it’s scarey just setting resolutions in xorg.conf without modelines, but I did just that, setting a resolution of 1920×1200. The text on Firefox is so crisp, it’s like wow. And I can put 2 Firefox windows side-by-each.

<MODE="KTel commercial"> But wait, there’s more </MODE>

We all know that most lower resolutions suck on LCD monitors, because they’re trying to interpolate partial pixels on top of a fixed physical resolution. However, if you can divide vertical and horizontal resolutions exactly by whole numbers, there’s no interpolation, although the image may start being blocky. Dividing 1920 by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 yields 960, 640, 480, 384, and 320. Similarly, dividing 1200 by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 yields 600, 400, 300, 240, and 200. So the following resolutions…

960×600 and 640×400 and 480×300 and 384×240 and 320×200

…are interpolation-free. The lower resolutions are great for playing videos from YouTube et al.

<MODE="KTel commercial> But wait, there’s even more </MODE>

You don’t necessarily have to combine 1920/3 with 1200/3 or 1920/4 with 1200/4. Any valid X resolution with any valid Y resolution is OK. Most possible combinations look ridiculous, but 640×600, 480×400, 384×300, and 320×240 are usable, indeed just right, for some videos.

OK, so I have the following video modes… 1920×1200, 960×600, 640×600, 640×400, 480×400, 480×300, 384×300, 384×240, 320×240, and 320×200. Now, how do I invoke X with the desired resolutions? I start off with /etc/X11/xorg.conf, with only 1920×1200 selected. Then I make a bunch of copies like so…

m3000 X11 # ll -og *.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 15165 Sep 13 20:43 320x200xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 15165 Sep 13 20:51 320x240xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 15165 Sep 13 19:51 384x240xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 15165 Sep 13 20:31 384x300xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 15165 Sep 13 19:50 480x300xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 15165 Sep 13 20:28 480x400xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 15165 Sep 13 19:49 640x400xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 15165 Sep 13 20:22 640x600xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 15165 Sep 13 19:48 960x600xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 15171 Sep 13 21:31 xorg.conf

Next, set the resolution in each copy to match the numbers in the filename (or else, you’ll end up being very confused).

Next, create the file ~/bin/x, with the following lines…

#! /bin/bash
startx -- -nolisten tcp -config ${1}xorg.conf &

If you invoke it as “x”, with no parameters, it’ll load using xorg.conf. If you invoke it as “x abcxdef”, it will try to start X using abcxdefxorg.conf. Give it the appropriate prefix, and it’ll start X with the corresponding conf file, e.g. “x 384x300” uses 384x300xorg.conf.

Or you could just list all the resolutions in the ‘Modes’ line of your config and use control+alt+numpadplus/control+alt+numpadminus to zoom, or even better use the x resolution switching program to change between them on the fly (I think gnome and kde even have little tools to do so) so you don’t even have to restart X to do it.

Not sure what mode vga=6 is.

That mode sets text console to 640×480 pixels instead of the default 640×400. Using the standard 16-pixel-high fonts, you get 80 cokumns by 30 rows IN REAL TEXTMODE, WITHOUT USING THE “SVGATextmode” PROGRAM. If I edit /etc/conf.d/consolefont to include the line…

CONSOLEFONT="lat1-10"

…it gives 80 columns by 48 rows with “vga=6“. In the default mode, it only gives 80 columns by 40 rows.

Or you could just list all the resolutions in the ‘Modes’ line of your config and use control+alt+numpadplus/control+alt+numpadminus to zoom, or even better use the x resolution switching program to change between them on the fly (I think GNOME and KDE even have little tools to do so) so you don’t even have to restart X to do it.

I used to do it a long time ago. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a SIGWINCH equivalant for programs in X. PyPanel (or any other panel program) disappears off the bottom of the screen if I flip to a smaller resolution. All programs still believe that they’re running the same resolution screen as when X started. This results in stuff disappearing off the edges of my “viewport”.

2005-12-27 ∞

I finally solved my brightness issue the hard way.. I had to change my colour settings .. I turned them down quite a bit and also turned down the brightness. Man this thing can put out a hell of a lot of power and needs to be reined back for regular home use.

Changing the X gamma settings didn’t help.. this solution seems to be working ok. My vision comes and goes sometimes, but this screen has been good to me so far. I’ve been very very picky about brightness in the past, preferring a rather dim display.. but I don’t want to sacrifice the overall quality of picture. A calibration might be in order.. I’ll get around to that eventually.

Footnotes

The official link has evaporated from the Dell website. It was accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=ca&l=en&s=dhs&cs=CADHS1&sku=320-4221&category_id=4058 (not archived). [ ↩ ]
was https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=3t2x5 [ ↩ ]
was https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=3t2x5 [ ↩ ]
was www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,120996,00.asp [ ↩ ]
was www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1764612,00.asp [ ↩ ]

spiralofhope

Dell 2405FPW