After waiting almost 3 weeks for its arrival. they have finally arrived on Monday at 11Am while I was trying to catch some sleep after working the previous night. In fact I almost missed the courier guy but luckily he called me to say that he was waiting at my front door. I have to say that it was my own version of “Christmas in July” – I quickly signed for both monitors and send the courier guy on his way.
I pushed both monitors in the lounge room and stood back to stare at the two huge boxes on my living room floor. First things first. I wanted to check what revision they are considering the fuss that people has been creating regarding the so called issues plaguing these monitors. I breathe a sigh of relief that they were both “Rev A02” – I opened one up and I was planning to take pictures of them but Donna forgot to bring the camera and I was not going to wait the next day before opening them. I’ve previously had the 2005fpw but only for a few days as I had sent them back to due backlight bleeding so I knew what to expect in regards to the package contents. I was interested to see the new stand though which I found quite stylish given the smaller footprint and nice aluminium finish. The back of the LCD is standard where you would have slot the first two holes and the top and click it in on the bottom. I took off the protective film on the front of the LCD and quickly scanned over it for any markings or manufacturing defects – breathe a sigh of relief when there are none.
I decided to first plug it in the fileserver PC which is running an XpertVision ATI Radeon 9550 256MB 128-bit DDR with no particular reason it just happenned to be the closest to the door. I didnt bother rebooting the PC, just unplugged the 15″ CRT and plugged in the 24″ monster. Turned the monitor on and it did its auto config for a few seconds before settling down on an incorrect resolution. I tried to adjust the resolution on the display properties but the only this it did was strech the current display even more and I couldnt see anything on the desktop. I was starting to get a little annoyed thing that this graphics card wont be able to display the native 1920×1200 resolution. Some technical intervention was required. I visited the ATI website and downloaded the latest Catalyst Drivers – I uninstalled the previous drivers and installed this version. Quick reboot and I was greeted with the classic Windows logon screen which looked tiny in the middle of all the screen space.
I logged on and “WOW” – that is $1100 well spent. I checked for dead pixels and found none, I changed the desktop background to black to find any traces of backlight bleeding and found none. I must admit I sat for a while thinking about what I’m going to do with it. I still had the other one sitting in the box and there was no way in hell that these two monitors will fit side by side on the corner workstation that I have which I have attached below:
Now the buyers regret starts to set in, hmm perhaps I didnt need two after all. Since last year I have developed this “buy two of each” attitude – I dont know what it is, for example I have – dual core processors, 2 x GB of RAM, 2 x 250GB HDD, 2 x routers, 2 PC’s – but dont worry babe, I only have one girfriend. Hehe, jeez I crack myself up.
Anyways I’m running out of witty things to write so I will save that for “Part II” special and this time with real images and perhaps even a video footage – Oh My God that is insane.