Dell SP2208WFP

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/monitors/0,39030121,49296709,00.htm

Reviewed 30 April 2008

Reviewed by Matthew Elliott

The Dell SP2208WFP offers a winning combination of high performance and low price. With a useful feature set and competitive price tag of £199, it's hard to make an argument against this 22-inch widescreen LCD.

Design
The Dell SP2208WFP boasts a clean and simple design. A 19mm silver bezel frames the display, which widens to 25mm along the top where the 2.0-megapixel webcam resides. A glossy black belt runs along the sides, which matches the black rectangular base. We'd opt for a matte black bezel, however, because it provides better contrast against the display itself while also receding into the background during movie watching.

You'll find hiding on the side two of the Dell's four USB ports

In the lower-right corner, you'll find five buttons for powering on the display and navigating the onscreen menu. A blue LED lets you know which video connection you're using: 1 for VGA, 2 for DVI and 3 for HDMI. The onscreen menu lets you adjust the colour, brightness and the position of the image.

The stand provides a very stable base that is not prone to wobble, and we like the look of it more than Dell's standard flying V base found on its enterprise-oriented UltraSharp line. It doesn't offer height adjustment, however, or the ability to swivel the display into portrait mode. The only physical adjustment you can make is tilting it forward and backward.

It may be more of a useful feature to us, as we set up and take down LCDs more than the typical consumer, but the stand simply snaps into the back of the display -- no tools required -- for a blissfully easy setup. A rectangular cutout in the arm of the stand helps you hide video and power cables.

Features
In addition to the standard VGA and DVI video connections, the Dell SP2208WFP also boasts an HDMI port, giving you the ability to connect the display to any graphics card and a wide range of consumer electronics. It offers HDCP support for displaying high-definition copyright-protected content. As with any 22-inch display, the native resolution of 1,680x1,050 pixels means you won't be able to display 1080p video without scaling.

There's also audio and power jacks for Dell's optional £35 speaker bar that attaches to the bottom of the display. Rounding out the features are four USB 2.0 ports and a 2-megapixel webcam with dual microphones.

Dell backs the monitor with a three-year warranty.

Performance
Out of the box and connected via DVI, we found the image had pink tint to it, which was easily corrected. There are also colour presets for multimedia and gaming along with red and blue presets, plus a user-defined preset. The gaming preset resulted in balanced colour levels for F.E.A.R., but the multimedia preset was not useful. It created an oversaturated picture with too much red. The normal or blue preset were better options for DVD viewing. You're also given the ability to change the screen ratio between 4:3 and 16:9, or have it fill the display.

The Dell SP2208WFP turned in unparalleled performance on our DisplayMate benchmarks. It separated itself from the pack. The SP2208WFP's aggregate score of 90 on our DisplayMate suite of tests is the highest such score we've seen to date. There was no area of weakness. It scored highly throughout, with top scores on greyscale and colour tests and uniformity and sharpness tests.

It scored well on our contrast ratio and brightness tests, although there are some displays that were brighter. Still, Windows apps looked crisp, with text legible down to a font size of 7. Though the default image setting was passable, we switched to the user-defined custom mode to lower the red level to get rid of the slight pink tint we saw on a blank, white Word doc.

The viewing angle moving side to side was more than acceptable, but when you move off the axis vertically, the screen darkens and colours shift quickly. With our eyes just above the top of the display and looking down at the center of the image, the image quality begins to suffer. Visitors to your desk will need to pull up a chair to share the display; those standing will see a poor image. In a brightly lit room, you might also find it picks up too much glare and reflections if employed as a straight productivity display.

Movies and games looked fantastic, with rich, vivid colours and smooth movement. The glossy screen coating helped smooth edges, and the 2ms response time (grey to grey) meant there was no ghosting.

We did find that the multimedia colour preset was not the right choice for movie watching, tending too much toward red. Using The Royal Tenenbaums as our test disc, Ben Stiller's red Adidas track suit looked practically radioactive. The Normal colour preset presented a much more balanced picture.

Conclusion
Excelling in testing and delivering outstanding results with DVDs and games, this monitor is a winner. Only its glossy screen coating lets it down. For scenarios where it'll perform double duty as a productivity and an entertainment display, we highly recommend the Dell SP2208WFP.

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday