Getting a Dell 1707FP to look good
About a month ago, Dell put the
display I was looking at on sale. The 1707FP was all-digital, and I have a
1702FP and 1704FPV at work, both of which I
like.
Unbeknownst to me
(since their web site didn’t mention it), the 1707FP pivots! My MacBook
Pro supports this, so I've got a portrait display
again!
People had said
that the display was bright, but what they didn’t say was that it just
didn’t have much contrast. I use the grey lines of iTunes as my standard,
and they were real hard to see, even with the brightness turned all the way
down, and the monitor calibrated. Worse, it was uneven -- one side was more
washed out than the other. And entirely unexpected, based on the other two 17
inch LCDs from Dell.
I
was all ready to return the display when I finally decided to look for other
settings before going through the hassle of contacting Dell. (I predicted a huge
pain, since it was impossible to find a way via their web site to support a
peripheral, rather than a computer.) This time I tried using the on-screen menu
to adjust Color Settings, and made a User Preset consisting of red, green, and
blue turned down to 87%. This actually gave me good results! And I was able to
turn the brightness back up from 7% to 87% as
well.
It’s not a
perfect match for the MacBook’s LCD, but I recalibrated, and it’s a
LOT better than the factory settings. I’m now happy keeping the
unit.
Posted: Mon - May 1, 2006 at 09:23 PM