Dell P780 17 inch CRT Monitor

For the longest time I was one of those people who refused to upgrade a computer component until it was either so obsolete it just couldn't run anything anymore or until it died outright.

Thus, I had been using my old 15" NEC monitor for the past 5 years and despite the huge price drops monitors have seen over the years I stuck with it until last month when it powered on for the last time.

After looking around at a few monitors I settled on the Dell P780 and I couldn't be happier.

Getting it home

First off, this is not a lightweight monitor. At 42 pounds it takes a bit of effort to get it out of the box and set it up.

Once I had it up and plugged into my computer I powered things up and I was shocked..

The difference between this screen and what I had been using was simply amazing.

Screen clarity.

I have a lamp in my den which sits behind my computer and when someone is sitting there using it to read, it used to cast a nasty reflection on my screen. It was something that I just learned to live with. But the P780's glare coating reduces this on my screen by 80% or more from what I was used to.

This monitor uses Trinitron technology and it shows every time the monitor is turned on. Basically, this means that the monitor uses a 0.24 mm minimum aperture grill within the screen to insure a crisp delivery of every pixel.

The image quality on first power-up was quite good. Very little flicker or fuzziness. After I went into my properties menu and set the monitor type to Dell P780 and adjusted the refresh rate to "optimal" all trace of flicker disappeared. In 1024x768 mode text quality was excellent as well. But despite all of this I wanted to see just what this monitor could do.

I decided to verify the monitor's convergence (the alignment of the red, blue and green guns in the monitor and how well they align when rendering pixels) by going to this Web Site:

http://www.scarse.org/adjust/convergence.html

..and checking the way the images appeared. While they were very close there was a slight variance in the alignment and so going into the monitor's own menu I adjusted the guns until the settings were as close to perfect as I could set them.

Looking at some text in Word after that was incredible. Now, my documents look better on my screen than they do when printed out.

Options, tools and specs.

The monitor offers a fairly comprehensive list of user adjustable features, these include:

Brightness
Contrast
Size/centering
Color (9300k/5000k)
Convergence
Language (for menu display: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and several others I can't translate :)
Degauss
Moire
and the ability to adjust where the on screen display is shown on screen.

All of these work quite well and enabled me to adjust the settings exactly to my preferences.

Specifications:

CRT size and type
17" Trinitron

Viewable image size
16.0"

Dot pitch/Aperture grille pitch (mm)
.24-.25mm

Horizontal scan range (kHZ)
30 - 85kHz

Vertical scan range (Hz)
48-120Hz

Emission Compliance
MPR-II and TCO 99'

Power Management Compliance
Energy Star, Nutek

Plug and Play Support
yes

Manageability Support
yes

Digital controls
yes

RGB color adjustment
yes

Moire cancel
yes

Optimal resolution
1024x768@85Hz

Maximum resolution
1600x1200@60Hz

Color
Pearl White

Dimensions (HxWxD)
16.4x15.9x16.5"

Weight
41.38lbs

The monitor came with a one year warranty on parts and labor.

The only real fault I found with this monitor it that the video cable is integrated and not detachable. So, if the cable breaks down at some point I will have to send in the whole monitor to be serviced.

One other thing to note. The monitor automatically goes through a degauss cycle every time it is turned on. Due to this, I would avoid placing floppy disks, credit cards or other fragile magnetic media near the monitor.

Overall, I am extremely happy with this purchase. The quality of the display is everything I could ask for and now I am left lamenting all those years I spent giving myself eyestrain staring at my old NEC.