Round 2: Day-to-day use

Though both the Apple Cinema Display and the Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP are intended primarily for graphic artists and other professionals, sometimes those users, too, will check e-mail, surf the Web, scroll through spreadsheets, and view online photo albums. For our basic productivity-task comparison, we used a variety of common PC applications to see how well each display was able to handle text and color. We looked at two Web sites: the text-based CNN.com and the graphic-laden, colorful CNET.com. We used Microsoft Excel and Word to look at different-size fonts, graphs, and lines, and we looked at a number of digital photographs to determine how accurately the UltraSharp 3007WFP and the Cinema Display represented color.

Text: In all of our text-based tests, the UltraSharp 3007WFP trumped the Apple Cinema Display with its antialiasing ability--that is, smoothing out corners and jagged edges to provide more readable text and shaper images. The Dell delivered smoother text on both the CNN.com and CNET.com Web pages, especially with bold, sans serif fonts, such as those in headlines. The UltraSharp 3007WFP's antialiasing superiority was again evident in our Word document and spreadsheet tests, showing much smoother sans serif fonts with less jagged text. In Word documents, the monitors had equal difficulty displaying very small serif and sans serif fonts, but the Dell again had the edge, with slightly less character-merging at 8 points and smaller.

Color: Rendering Web-based color was a breeze for both monitors, though we felt that the Apple was slightly more vibrant, with solid background colors. Since Web images are often optimized for the Web with lower resolutions, we also looked at two 3,072x2,048-pixel photos from a digital camera at 80 percent of their original size. The two photos, one of a verdant beach setting and another of a busy city street, appeared bright and vibrant, though the Apple display created slightly sharper images and showed more subtle changes in hue. In the lush beach scene, however, Dell's green rendering appeared slightly richer than Apple's.

The winner? For its smoother text production, we're giving this round to the Dell. The Apple's slightly richer color doesn't make up for its considerably more jagged-edged text.