Gateway FPD2485W: 24" LCD Beauty or Beast?
by Jarred Walton on February 22, 2007 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Displays
Subjective Evaluation
Given that most users do not have access to hardware display calibration tools, we initially spent some time using the display without ever properly calibrating it in order to gain an impression of how most users would react. We thought we would start with our subjective evaluation before getting to the actual quantitative results.
Having used a Dell 24" LCD for a while now, the first impression we got is that other than a few modified features, there wasn't a huge difference between the Gateway FPD2485W and a Dell 2407WFP - or a 2405FPW for that matter. The addition of HDCP support will be important to some people, but the 2407WFP already has that. The Gateway LCD offers an extra component input, but the Dell LCDs counter by offering integrated flash memory readers. We would also give Dell the advantage when it comes to their On-Screen Displays - and ironically we prefer the 2405FPW OSD to the 2407WFP OSD. So our initial impression is that the Gateway FPD2485W really isn't any better than the existing 24" Dell LCDs, but neither is it worse.
As we used to display more, some of the extra features that Gateway added were noticed. It seems like 1080p support should be a given on any LCD capable of running at 1920x1200 resolution, and many people would like to have 1920x1080 resolution without any stretching. The Dell monitors can run 1080p, but apparently not with HDCP and without doing stretching; the Gateway display can manage HDCP with 1080p at a 1:1 ratio. That seems like a minor consideration, but some people have gotten pretty upset about the lack of unstretched 1080p support on 1920x1200 displays.
One of the other nice aspects about the Gateway LCD is that properly reported all of the standard 16:10 aspect ratio resolutions in its driver (1920x1200, 1680x1050, and 1440x900). At times, we have found it necessary to manually add some of those resolutions on other displays. All of the displays handle those resolutions properly, but frequently only the maximum widescreen resolution shows up with Dell's 24" LCDs.
Other aspects of the display weren't quite as promising. Running non-native resolutions seem to be pretty hit or miss. 1440x900 looked fine - a little blurry, but that's to be expected - but 1680x1050 didn't look good at all. It would probably be sufficient for video content or playing games if you're not too picky, but you definitely want to stick with the native resolution if at all possible. You can always turn off any content stretching if you prefer black bars over poorly stretched content, but the Gateway LCD could definitely benefit from an improved scaling algorithm for 1680x1050 content.
It generally goes without saying that there's always a bit of backlight bleed on LCDs. For the time being, the manufacturers have not yet been able to create an LCD that can fully block all light, so pure black never ends up being completely black. In some instances, this doesn't really matter, and games can actually benefit in our opinion. However, if you're watching a dark movie with the lights out, backlight bleed can be a distraction. The FPD2485W didn't seem to be much worse than other LCDs we've used, but then we noticed that the backlighting tended to be a bit more visible in the corners of our test unit. We took a picture of the display with black content showing to highlight the effect - while the image looks gray, the important aspect is the brighter corners; in person the center is relatively black. The backlight bleed in the corners was definitely worse than elsewhere, but honestly the only time we ever noticed it was when we walked in with the lights out while the "blank screen" screensaver was active. It never bothered us during games or movie watching, but other users might be less forgiving.
Overall, the display provided a good experience, but nothing that we would consider dramatically better than competing offerings. Playing games, watching movies, or simply doing web surfing or office work never presented any difficulties. The display is somewhat brighter than older LCDs like Dell's 2405FPW, but it appears nearly identical to the more recent 2407WFP. (Once you properly adjust the brightness and contrast levels, however, any brightness "advantage" is greatly diminished.) If you already have a 24" widescreen display, there's really no reason to consider upgrading to the Gateway in our opinion, but if you're already on the market for a new 24" display its definitely worthy of consideration.
Now let's take a look at how the display does in actual quantitative testing.
Given that most users do not have access to hardware display calibration tools, we initially spent some time using the display without ever properly calibrating it in order to gain an impression of how most users would react. We thought we would start with our subjective evaluation before getting to the actual quantitative results.
Having used a Dell 24" LCD for a while now, the first impression we got is that other than a few modified features, there wasn't a huge difference between the Gateway FPD2485W and a Dell 2407WFP - or a 2405FPW for that matter. The addition of HDCP support will be important to some people, but the 2407WFP already has that. The Gateway LCD offers an extra component input, but the Dell LCDs counter by offering integrated flash memory readers. We would also give Dell the advantage when it comes to their On-Screen Displays - and ironically we prefer the 2405FPW OSD to the 2407WFP OSD. So our initial impression is that the Gateway FPD2485W really isn't any better than the existing 24" Dell LCDs, but neither is it worse.
As we used to display more, some of the extra features that Gateway added were noticed. It seems like 1080p support should be a given on any LCD capable of running at 1920x1200 resolution, and many people would like to have 1920x1080 resolution without any stretching. The Dell monitors can run 1080p, but apparently not with HDCP and without doing stretching; the Gateway display can manage HDCP with 1080p at a 1:1 ratio. That seems like a minor consideration, but some people have gotten pretty upset about the lack of unstretched 1080p support on 1920x1200 displays.
One of the other nice aspects about the Gateway LCD is that properly reported all of the standard 16:10 aspect ratio resolutions in its driver (1920x1200, 1680x1050, and 1440x900). At times, we have found it necessary to manually add some of those resolutions on other displays. All of the displays handle those resolutions properly, but frequently only the maximum widescreen resolution shows up with Dell's 24" LCDs.
Other aspects of the display weren't quite as promising. Running non-native resolutions seem to be pretty hit or miss. 1440x900 looked fine - a little blurry, but that's to be expected - but 1680x1050 didn't look good at all. It would probably be sufficient for video content or playing games if you're not too picky, but you definitely want to stick with the native resolution if at all possible. You can always turn off any content stretching if you prefer black bars over poorly stretched content, but the Gateway LCD could definitely benefit from an improved scaling algorithm for 1680x1050 content.
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| Click to enlarge |
It generally goes without saying that there's always a bit of backlight bleed on LCDs. For the time being, the manufacturers have not yet been able to create an LCD that can fully block all light, so pure black never ends up being completely black. In some instances, this doesn't really matter, and games can actually benefit in our opinion. However, if you're watching a dark movie with the lights out, backlight bleed can be a distraction. The FPD2485W didn't seem to be much worse than other LCDs we've used, but then we noticed that the backlighting tended to be a bit more visible in the corners of our test unit. We took a picture of the display with black content showing to highlight the effect - while the image looks gray, the important aspect is the brighter corners; in person the center is relatively black. The backlight bleed in the corners was definitely worse than elsewhere, but honestly the only time we ever noticed it was when we walked in with the lights out while the "blank screen" screensaver was active. It never bothered us during games or movie watching, but other users might be less forgiving.
Overall, the display provided a good experience, but nothing that we would consider dramatically better than competing offerings. Playing games, watching movies, or simply doing web surfing or office work never presented any difficulties. The display is somewhat brighter than older LCDs like Dell's 2405FPW, but it appears nearly identical to the more recent 2407WFP. (Once you properly adjust the brightness and contrast levels, however, any brightness "advantage" is greatly diminished.) If you already have a 24" widescreen display, there's really no reason to consider upgrading to the Gateway in our opinion, but if you're already on the market for a new 24" display its definitely worthy of consideration.
Now let's take a look at how the display does in actual quantitative testing.
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anandtech02148 - Thursday, February 22, 2007 - link
I find the Westinghouse 37 lcdtv eye candies with all the pluggins you could want, for pc, consoles and whatever hi-def format.and it has native resolution as this Gateway 24.
Dell is losing it touches lately, Westinghouse got a niche here they should runaway with it.
JarredWalton - Thursday, February 22, 2007 - link
I'll see if I can get one for review - I'd certainly like to check out some of the LCD-TVs that can function as computer displays. Of course, pixel pitch is going to be a lot larger on a 37" 1080p display, and while that may be fine for HDTV and gaming purposes, it probably isn't the best for close up computer work.Welshtrog - Thursday, February 22, 2007 - link
I am looking at these displays with interest, however there is nothing in this review that will change my mind regarding retaining my 19" Flat screen CRT just yet, It has good colour accuracy after being set up and no stuck pixelsJarredWalton - Thursday, February 22, 2007 - link
I've got two decent 19" CRTs still (NEC FE991 and Samsung 997DF), and honestly I can't stand using them after I switched to a 24" LCD 18 months ago. I still get irritated by image tear caused by the 60Hz refresh rate, but in all other areas I'm a lot happier with larger LCDs over CRTs. Part of that is simply the expanded screen size, but the reduced footprint is nice as well. I bailed on CRTs a few years ago and haven't really missed them, although I can certainly understand the hesitation. The $600+ prices doesn't help either. :)Justin Case - Thursday, February 22, 2007 - link
The review doesn't address this. I know it says "16 million colors", but all manufacturers say that, and 90% of them use 6-bit panels with automatic dithering. The fact that this is an active matrix TFT, coupled with the very low resposne time suggests that this is a 6-bit panel, like the majority.This means more banding and dithered midtones. Which is probably fine for "office" use, but it makes the LCD unusable for photo work (actually, any LCD short of an Eizo CG is pretty much useless for photo work, IMO, and even those just barely manage to match a high-end CRT), and can make games and movies look pretty bad, too.
To test this, just display a smooth gradient (at the monitor's native resolution) and either look at it very closely or take a photograph of a very small area (about 10 pixels wide), and then increase its contrast until the darkest color is black and the brightest color is white. If you see dithering or banding at the pixel level in the intermediate shades, it's a 6-bit panel.
Aquila76 - Thursday, February 22, 2007 - link
It is an 8 bit S-PVA panel, like the Dell and Samsung 244t. It does 'real' 16.7 million colors, but as I stated previously (and as Jarred can attest) it is nowhere near accurate.Justin Case - Thursday, February 22, 2007 - link
I'd still like to see a "real" test of the screen (by taking a high-speed photo of a small area). Some panels out there do intermeidate colors by flipping between two shades. The panel _accepts_ 8-bit values, but the LCs don't actually have 256 stable transparency levels.Not that I'm very interested in this particular model, but I think it would be useful if review sites actually did that, rather than trusting what the manufacturers tell them.
Even in high-end professional equipment there's a lot of deception. Consumer stuff is even worse (ex., until about a year ago there were almost no real 1920x1080 HDTV sets out there; apart from Sharp, they were all 1366x768 and below, but they all claimed to "support 1920x1080", because they could take it as an input signal).
strikeback03 - Thursday, February 22, 2007 - link
meh, the color calibration results aren't great, considering on my laptop I have an average dE of around .6 and only 3 values over 1 (out of the 42 tested by my Eye-One Display 2). I'll probably still pick one up though, as it's the only locally available 24" display.Other reviews I read online spoke of crushed blacks which calibration did not correct when viewing movies. Any comments on this?
Gary Key - Thursday, February 22, 2007 - link
Jarred is currently reviewing the requests/questions and will have responses later today.
xtknight - Friday, February 23, 2007 - link
When you calibrate using a colorimeter and accompanying software, it only loads the LUT (lookup table) on to the desktop. When you watch a movie, most of the time you're using overlay, which to my knowledge does not allow the fine tuning needed for a lookup table. With VMR you could potentially view videos calibrated, although the last time I tried this I had some odd 16-240 level compression problem.I've been meaning to investigate the overlay "LUT" (or to even find if it exists in the first place). I've seen a function in NVIDIA's control panel API that allows the loading of a LUT onto the overlay surface so I'll see what's up with that.