NEC and LaCie Lead On Professional LCD Gear

A Real Performer In Latency

The latency of this panel has been specified sometimes as 25 ms, sometimes 8 ms G2G (grey to grey), so it's difficult to know what to believe. So we measured the panel's latency to get to the heart of the matter. It is, as you'd expect, a great performer.

The profile at least is odd. Our tests showed that the product uses a base overdrive solution to achieve the latency figures that we can see here. Now overdrive isn't a miraculous solution as you can see, with latency reaching 23 ms in the worst case. It's better than most of the TN+ screens on the market, but it's still noticeably on the slow side compared to the ViewSonic VP191b.

In Practice

The 2405FPW, just like its stable mate the 2001FP, is an excellent monitor for CAD/CAM. The colors are well saturated at its native resolution of 1920x1200, which makes it the dream candidate for circuit design, for example. Depending on the situation, the designer could have at his disposal even a fully zoomed-out view with a sufficient level of detail. As usual with Dell, you'll need to use the DVI interface to get the best from this monitor.

For photo editing this is a good choice, but not top of the range. For a few hundred dollars more, photographers would be better off treating themselves to a LaCie 321.

The monitor's higher native resolution would very comfortably support the display of two pages of text side by side. Unfortunately, brightness is too strong for the office. It may seem a bit crazy, but a more economical solution could be to buy two monitors - a 17" and a 19"! This arrangement would support office applications and still be suitable for CAD.

Video noise while watching DVDs is strongly evident. This is a shame, because the format of the screen would be perfect for this application. Forget it, though - there is definitely too much video noise and, in addition, viewing angles aren't suitable. Games are clearly not this monitor's strength, either; it's too slow, and the monitor displays annoying lags. Worst of all, moving images lose sharpness in their textures.

Conclusion

If business is going well and your boss really likes you, demand a Dell 2405 FPW for your CAD/CAM work. It really is a pleasure to use day-to-day, and its resolution is unequaled for comfortable viewing.