Dell UltraSharp 2007WFP

Pros: Backlighting, high contrast, pip, pbp, pivot

Cons: Minor detail lost in blacks, pivot requires you to tilt monitor out first

Summary: A fantastic monitor that gives a lot of real estate for a very reasonable price. Fantastic backlighting and viewing angle is superb. The ability to format a 4:3 image as scaled or stretched and even zoomed allows great flexability.

Text is clean and crisp, colours are pretty accurate, however due to the high contrast minor details can become lost in the darker regions of the picture.

Coming from a beloved Hitachi 19" CRT the screen is very bright and just shows how much LCDs have improved over the last 18 months. Backlighting and the increased contrast ratio (over the 2005FPW) are welcome improvements.

Gaming is superb with no visible tearing in NFS Most Wanted. Have yet to see any ghosting. I'm more of an occasional gamer, but I think this monitor performed admirably and even though the game was running at 1024x768 the graphics were still crisp showing the monitors processor does a great job of scaling. I don't really watch movies from my computer, but I did test We Were Soldiers. The dark scenes were a little too dark for my liking. This may be a result of the increased contrast. You can compensate for this through your graphics card drivers though, but this may be important for those who want use this primarily for movies.

The stand is easy to use, however my gripe with this is that when you want to pivot this massive screen you have to tilt the screen upwards else the corner of the screen hits the stand or desk.

The OSD is okay, but a little fiddly and you'll probably want to adjust the transparency to make it more clear which menu item you are actually on. Love the Pcture In P icture and Picture By Picture (PBP) modes, although the images are way too small in PBP to be usable. These are both only usable by Composite and S-video inputs and not by the analog input (assuming you are using the DVI interface).

The buttons on the base of the screen allow you to select any one of the four inputs, select standard, PIP or PBP modes or access the menu.

The inclusion of 4 USB ports (2 on the side plus 2 on the rear) is great and is a welcome feature. Cable management is also great and is very Apple like.

I would highly recommend this monitor, but if you are coming from a 19" CRT you won't get a massive increase in real estate, so you may want to keep your old monitor and use it as a second monitor for dual screen (as I have)... Depending on your needs of course.

Overall, I love this monitor and Dell's customer service is second to none. With a 14 day no quibble returns policy and a 3 year on-site warranty you really can't go wrong with this screen.