Received my Dell U2410 (16th September 2011)

It absolutely deserves the enthusiasm you can find for it all over the web. At £312 this is the most expensive thing I have bought as a treat. After months of research and days of setup, I am now one very happy owner! c{¦¬)

Delivery

Delivered in a rather uninterested way, the dude walked off to avoid carrying it up the stairs. Had lunch while reading the manual.

Happily it’s about half the weight of my LG Flatron 915FT Plus, a CRT made in 2001. Carrying it wasn’t much bother. The box has unpackaging instructions on it and the manuals are all in the end you open first, which is handy.

RTFM

CD has a rather old-fashioned, auto-running HTML manual. Weirdly it started in Internet Explorer instead of my default browser, which is Firefox. Easy enough to copy the URL over and continue from there.

After reading all the setup stuff I got to the point of no return. Switch off the PC, change the data leads over and hope it restarts. That’s the point at which I finish this paragraph…

PC Works!

Everything booted fine and it worked straight away. Hooray!

Wow, it’s so sharp. Text looks amazing, even over VGA. Reviews said it has excellent VGA support and that’s the lead which is plugged in when it ships. Really, this is a noticable step up.

The pixels are about 20% bigger than my previous screen. This means I no longer find myself leaning into it, until my nose almost touches the screen. Now I sit normally, even lean back from it at times. This should be good for my eyesight.

In the evening, I’m currently using Brightness = 5 and Contrast = 15. Yes, those are the actual values and not typos.

Freeview Box Works!

Connected from the Component output of the box into the Component input of the screen. A composit lead with left audio and right audio lead fitted the plugs and produces adequate quality, so I deceded not to buy a proper component lead.

A really cool thing is the Picture In Picture (PiP) feature which lets me have the Freeview running in the bottom left while I do desktop stuff in the rest of the screen.

A separate lead carries Left Audio and Right Audio from the Freeview box directly to a Hi-Fi unit. It has a pair of large speakers, one either side of the futon.

The swivel stand for the monitor is perfect for viewing this screen when on the futon.

Playstation Works!

Using the Component plug, same as my TV in Fleet. Picture quality really shows how far from HD it is when sitting in the PC chair. But it’s good from the futon.

The Left Audio and Right Audio leads from the Playstation are not connected to anything at the moment. I’ll extend them to reach the Hi-Fi in due course, since that will require buying a cable.

Headphones Work!

So far only tried listening to the TV by plugging headphones into the Hi-Fi unit. It worked fine, though.

Overall Amazement

Seriously, this screen has totally delivered everything I had hoped. None of the pitfalls I was worried about have come true. My old CRT was great for it’s day but this Dell U2410 is in a higher league.