Dell UltraSharp 2001FP Preview: Gaming LCDs for the Masses

By Popular request...

Here are a few quick looks at some demanding full screen applications (except Solitaire, which is windowed).

The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix - As with our previous benchmarks, these are not spectacular movies to test colors subjectively. However, as far as high motion video, both movies were quite acceptable on the 2001FP. Colors tended to be a little bluer than normal, and as in the frame below, it's obvious that darks are not dark as they should be. The slight problem with backlight alignment that we mentioned earlier is over exaggerated by the still camera (upper right).

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Morrowind - Our synopsis of this 1600x1200 LCD wouldn't be complete without some games running at 1600x1200. Although the screenshot cannot tell you much, zooming in reveals that this game is showing up the way it was meant on the monitor.

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Firewarrior - Another game we decided to load up at 1600x1200. Firewarrior does a decent job of displaying lots of different extreme hues at the same time, and from the 1600x1200 game, we did not notice anything out of the ordinary.

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Max Payne and Max Payne 2 - Response time is definitely acceptable (although it is amplified by still images). We noticed no immediate blurring, but being that Max Payne lacks color depth, this is not the best game on which to judge response time. Darks were a little bit too bright, but acceptable.

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Halo - We had some mixed feelings while playing Halo. Granted, we spend a lot of time playing Halo on DLP screens via component input (XBox of course). There is a noticeable difference between playing Halo on a CRT and on an LCD. For probably 2/3 of the games we play, pixel blur is not noticeable; but on a game like Halo, it is. We suspect this is due to the larger amounts of gray-to-gray (and gray-to-black) transitions. Below, you can see where our camera captured some blur.

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Solitaire - Again noticeable, but you can see the difference below. On the left is a Dell 1702FP LCD; on the right is the 2001FP. Notice the challenged response time on the 1702FP. The 2001FP seems to be displaying fewer copies of the cursor, even though we are using a program to pull the cursor from left to right at the same speed in both images.