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Review: My Dell LCD UltraSharp Monitor

Until today, I used a CRT. What can I say? I'm cheap. Problem is the desk it sat on was small, and the display was too close for my inelastic lenses. I had trouble focusing, even though I use a similar CRT at work. The vision problem, a desire for more desk space, a $100 discount (usual periodic Dell sale) and free shipping (Dell small business account) pushed me over the edge. I also knew that I'd want an external monitor for my MacBook, so I might as well get a good one now. (I'm waiting for either my iBook to die or for MacBook rev 2 to come out.)

I bought the UltraSharp 2007FPW 20.1-inch Widescreen Flat Panel LCD Monitor with Height Adjustable Stand and 3-Year Warranty

I carefully removed my Samsung 17" CRT and lovingly laid it on a comfortable chair. As I turned away it gracefully leaned forward. I almost caught it. The thunderous crash did not obscure my oath. The Samsung had chosen an honorable death over exile to the attic. There was no going back.

A few comments:

• I come from the days of nonstandard interfaces, of scan rates and Mhz mismatch. I never expected that my 4 year old Intel integrated video would drive this at its full 1680x1050 resolution -- but it did. It even supports rotating for a large portrait view.
• I plugged it directly into my running PC -- it couldn't manage the input. I restarted, all was well. I easily adjusted to full resolution. Moral -- turn off the PC first. Again, better than expected. Progress, I must ruefully admit, has occurred.
• It has 4 powered USB 2.0 ports and it comes with a 2.0 cable. Nice.
• It comes with a VGA and DVI cable. Nice.
• It has S-Video and Composite video inputs -- so you can use it as a display for your home theater if you'd like.
• It's has a 1.6 aspect radio (16:10), which is DVD/Movie (16:9) like. Compared to a traditional TV like 12:9 aspect ratio it feels a bit squashed for its width. Note that lower end digital cameras are 12:9 ratio and fit perfectly on an older monitor. On the other hand my dSLR outputs 15:10 and does well on this display. It's the same aspect ratio and size as my 20" iMac display.
• The default brightness is very, very bright. I turned it down to about 20%.
• You can buy a speaker system, the Dell soundbar, that fits below the monitor. The monitor has a power out for the speakers.
• The stand seems quite excellent.
• Unlike a CRT, which would flicker terribly at 60 Hz vertical frequency, this display does fine.
• The display is sold at 3 price points for a 3 year warranty, a 4 year warranty and a 5 year warranty. Will Dell still be around in 5 years? Probably, but 3 years plus the 1 year extended AMEX gives me is pretty long.
  
• The documentation is HTML based and it's a bit of pain to copy to one's hard drive -- where I keep such things. No problem for a geek, but it would defeat many others.
• I hesitate to say this, but so far I've really no complaints. That's rather odd for me. I'm sure I'll think of something.

Update 7/6/06: That didn't take long. I noticed the monitor had no color profile associated with it. I dug through the documentation and tried Dell's support site, but there was nothing there. I then browsed the CD and found a readme.txt file in the root. It said:

This 2007WFP.INF file is a digitally signed driver that supports the
following Dell monitor in Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP and x64 operating systems ...

So I followed the readme directions and ... nothing happened. XP was ignoring the INF file. I did see 2007WFP.icm in the same directory; ICM is Microsoft's extension for color profile specification files. I manually assigned this color profile to the display. Dell gets a few dings for lousy documentation, lousy web site support files, and a .INF file that doesn't do anything. Ahh. I feel better now ... A Google search on 2007WFP.icm turned up nothing. Well, it's online now ...

Aperture: a lower end user's perspective

Bagelturf is a "low end" (G5 iMac) Aperture user took his blog postings and reorganized them into a topical view topical view. I love the reuse and refactoring aspect of this, but I'm particularly interested because his configuration is similar to my setup.

I have come to like iPhoto 6 so much, save for its $##% inability to import Libraries, that I'm tempted to wait for iPhoto 7 and extend iPhoto 6 with Adobe Photoshop Elements. On the other hand, the Amazon reviews for Elements 4.0 have been pretty bleak. So I'm looking ...

Cooking the user: MacBook Pro

Tidbits channels Guy Noir in The Mystery of the Burnt Thighs. These MacBook Pros may have been overheating due to a bug in OS X SMB services. I had a similar heating problem with my iMac due to a buggy Canon print driver. A stuck print job pegged the CPU and just about cooked the iMac.

If my iBook holds up I'll wait for rev. B of the MacBook. I'm not interested in the MacBook Pro.

Update 9/3/09: Many years later Canon printer drivers are still driving OS X users mad and Canon scanner drivers are no better. Don't buy Canon hardware.

Microsoft's thin client version of Office - via Citrix

Fascinating. Microsoft is offering Office 2007 to play with -- using Citrix. How far away can a Citrix acquisition be? Is this anyting more than a marketing gimmick?

It's way, way, past time that OS X implements a thin client solution -- this is the way most productivity applications should be deployed in the home. It needs to be built into 10.5 as Windows Remote Desktop (shares some heritage with Citrix I think) is build into XP Pro.

iWeb: The good, the bad, the ugly

I've been experimenting with iWeb. I publish to a local folder then upload to server. I'll update this. I am using it only for small projects because of 'the ugly'. I don't know of good alternatives on OS X, or for that matter, for XP either [1]. Sandvox is the obvious alternative, but the lack of documentation suggests that its future is very limited. [2]

The good

• iLife integration is pretty darned impressive, particularly iPhoto integration.
• Suppose you want to link to a local file. Click create link, then choose the file. iLife copies the file to its store and creates a local reference. Elegant.
  

The bad

• Fixed width pages.
• Does it ever empty out its database store? I opened the package and found lots of unreferenced stuff from deleted pages. Maybe there's a garbage collection? This could get ugly.
• No importing of existing web pages.
  

The ugly

• You can't switch templates. The template you start with is the template you live with. (And this is a database driven application?!)
  
• Template customization is insanely hard.
  
• Your work is stored in a proprietary data structure. You can't migrate your work easily to other environments.
  

[1] Things were much better in the mid 90s. The consumer web publication niche has since been supplanted by professional products, blogs, Ajax web-apps and minimalist tools like iWeb.

[2] Documentation is to software as facial symmetry is to humans. It's costly to do and has no obvious immediate survival advantages -- so it's a marker for an optimal genome that can afford to "splurge" on hard to do things. Hence the value in mate selection, or so the evolutionary biologists claim. The pathetic state of Sandvox documentation tells me that, no matter how good it may be, it lacks the capital to compete and survive.

OS X: Use / in Open or Save As dialogs