One of the graduation presents I recently recieved was a brand spankin’ new Dell 2005FPW 25″ flat-panel monitor. Before you think I’ve got a TV plugged into my computer, I should mention that the 2005FPW is a wide-aspect screen (e.g. 16 : 10 :: width : height, as opposed to the 4 : 3 of the typical CRT monitor) so the 25″ is a little misleading. That being said, this monitor is busy kicking ass, reaching for names, then pulling back and saying, “No, I’m too busy kicking ass to take names.” This monitor is bright, it’s got good contrast, deep color, and no evidence of frame tearing.* Input is accepted from serial, DVI, S-Video, or composite input sources, which makes it capable of serving as a TV as well as a monitor. With its built in picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture functions, you can watch TV and play games SIMULTANEOUSLY! Although the list price is on the steep side ($560 as of publish), this monitor has appeared on Dell’s pimp-list in recent months, allowing reductions in price down into the $350 range. A little savvy interweb searching should turn up lots of coupons for price reduction.

To test the full capacities of the monitor, I fired up two games from recent years that hung their hats on graphic effects: Far Cry and Half-Life 2. Both games played beautifully (especially Far Cry’s lush tropical locales) but I noticed some interesting differences between the two. Compare the following screen shots, first in a 1024 x 768 (4 : 3), then in a 1280 : 768 (16 : 10) resolution:

from Far Cry:


Ahhh…a day on the beach. With mercenaries.

and from Half-Life 2:


No mercenaries here, just killer mutant bugs… Screw the beach, let’s go to a mall.

Both look really good in the 16 : 10 aspect ratio, but the interesting thing to notice is that Half-Life 2 is actually showing you more of the world around you. Look at the butt of the submachine gun and it becomes clear. Far Cry, on the other hand, actually shows you LESS of the world around you. Compare the palm trees on the left side of the image and the clouds at the top of the image. I’m a little dissapointed in Far Cry, to be honest. Perhaps it was asking an unreasonable thing to have expanded visual content at the time of its release, but all they did was zoom in a little bit and clip the sides to fit. That being said, I still prefer the wider format simply because it feels more immersive. The lack of peripheral vision in FPS games are, in my mind, their greatest hurdle to a deeper immersive experience.

As an aside, and this will be no shock to anyone using a flat-panel monitor, but I have to say that one of the best things about the new monitor is that it weighs almost nothing compared to a typical CRT. I’ve been lugging around a 19″ CRT for seven years now, and while I’ve never complained, I felt deeply liberated when the DHL delivery man handed me the box containing my new screen. Ryan tells me that only a CRT can deliver real-world color, but since I am not a graphic designer and I am partially color-blind, this doesn’t really bother me. I’d rather shed the six gojillion pounds of the CRT (for those less numerically inclined, gojillion is right between bazillion and cotillion). My only dissapointment with this monitor is that my video card doesn’t support wide-aspect resolutions past 1280 x 768 while the monitor goes to 11. I mean, to 1600 x 1050.

Such a rough life I lead…

* for those unfamiliar with the term, frame tearing is the unfortunate result of a monitor being too slow to respond to rapidly changing screen content. Images appear to stick to the screen and bits are left behind as you turn or move. The image on the screen appears to “tear” as you move, thus, frame tearing. Monitors should have a response time ≤16 microseconds to avoid this effect, although gains are minimal below this point.