Jonathan Davies

You may have noticed something new pop up along the sidebar of my site in the last couple of weeks and I haven’t had a chance to write a post talking about it (luckily, Daniel, reminded me ). Thanks to, Jerry, from Embraceware I officially have a sponsor for the blog!

Jerry develops Awaken - the best alarm clock program for the Mac; which you may have seen recently in this year’s Macheist Bundle.

All I can say about Awaken is that it has made getting up a joy, something that I can’t say I ever imagined it would ever be.

If you can’t take my word, for it maybe these will make you:

“I went from a person who hated getting out of bed to someone who couldn’t wait to hear my iTunes music play in the morning when my iMac woke me - so much better than having a family member open the curtains and shout get up!”

- Glenn Wolsey

Without Awaken, I would have been fired long ago.”

- Matthew Kelling

“A wonderfully elegant, simple to use, yet highly sophisticated program! Thanks a million!”

- Ryan Patrico

Once again, thank-you Jerry for sponsoring the site!

If anybody else would like to advertise on the site then please do not hesitate to contact me.

Dell, not Apple?

There were a couple of reasons that made me choose not to go with the Apple Displays. One, the price, with the cost of one Apple 23” Cinema Display I could have bought about two of these monitors - give or talk about £20. Obviously that was one big point and even if there weren’t these others I would have still got this one. A higher contrast ratio of 1000:1 with the cinema displays having a petty 700:1. Also, the Dell 24@ Monitor has a far better response time of 5ms. (great for gaming especially) while the ACD has 14ms. response time. If you ask me there is quite a difference, and I’m not sure if I would be able to live with myself knowing that I payed double the price for a far inferior display. The main reason for these terrible specifications is the fact that Apple has frankly been too lazy to upgrade these to a better spec; and on that side of things, after using both a 23” Cinema Display and this, I kinda’ prefer this.

Design

I’ll briefly touch on some interesting design points, the stand is very stable, and I don’t feel insecure about having it on the edge of my desk, though made of plastic, it has a very professional finish. One downside is the lack on adjustability; you can only tilt the monitor, not raise the height of it, also as far as I can see you can’t rotate the screen into portrait mode, not something that I’d like to do myself, but others may. There is also a limited amount of inputs, only DVI and VGA. Compared to it’s big brother, the UltraSharp 2407WFP-HC (which for some reason I am no longer able to find on the UK Dell Store), my monitor does not have the extra video capabilities. Some of these ports however may have been useful because after having the monitor for a relatively short amount of time I have already been asked by several people if we can hook it up to the Xbox 360 (which you can, you just need an adapter).

Performance

The display is very bright, sadly not as bright as my MacBook Pro (which does happen to have an LED backlit screen) but very close. The native resolution of the display is 1920×1200, which is to be expected for the size of the display. So far I have not discovered any dead pixels and I certainly don’t intend to either. The monitor is very fast to tuen on, pretty much instant. A couple of extra points that should be noted: The display does not have a biult in card reader, if you want that then you have to get the UltraSharp model. Also, you might want a big desk. This thing is massive, my desk is over two meters long and it still makes a big dent in desk, not Dell’s fault just that it is the nature with buying such a large display.

Conclusion:

I am incredibly impressed with the Dell E248WFP 24” Monitor, it has lived up and become more than what I ever expected of it. For £320 it was a bargain, though it’s RRP is £402 so I would wait for another offer if the price pops back up again. I highly recommend it and will be able to report back on it’s performance in the near future when I talk about it’s gaming performance and CS3 abilities. What monitor do you use and why? Did you go Dell or Apple? Tell us by leaving a comment - I’d be very interested in knowing why.