Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3703/dell-g2410h-review-a-green-24-lcd



It’s been a criminally long time since we’ve had a display review, partly because we’ve been changing and revamping our test bench with some new things you’ve been asking for, and partly because Jarred has graciously offered to let me do display reviews while he focuses on notebooks and other greater things. His are some hugely big shoes to fill, so go easy on me. ;) But enough with that, let’s dive right in!

If you’re familiar with the G2410, you’ll find that the G2410H is much the same, with one major difference - a higher-end height adjustable stand. This ergonomic shortcoming was something criticized in its earlier brethren, which many argued sacrificed too much in the way of utility. It's amazing how much importance one can impart to a simple stand.
 


The G2410H rectifies the matter this time with a height, rotate, and tilt adjustable stand complete with a cable management port square in the back. If you’ve seen other Dell monitors, you’ve probably seen this mount before, as it’s common to the U2410 and myriad others.

In a sea of relatively generic TN panels, the G2410H doesn't stand out immediately, though it does feature WLED backlighting instead of older CCFL technology. As we’ll see later though, this combination isn’t going to set any records for color gamut, as CCFL again usually produces better results in practice. But the real point of using WLED is all about that green cred. It’s apparent that Dell’s aims were more on keeping power consumption down with WLEDs and a few other things.

The G2410 is priced at an MSRP of $339, making it more expensive than similarly sized 24” TN panel-packing monitors, but it packs a bevy of features not found in those other generic displays. That brings us to the details:

 
Dell G2410H - Specifications
Property Quoted Specification
Video Inputs Dual-link DVI with HDCP
VGA
Panel Type TN (14K0N9CS346U)
Pixel Pitch 0.277mm
Colors 16.7 million colors
Brightness 250 nits typical
Contrast Ratio 1000:1 advertised
1000000:1 Dynamic advertised
Response Time 5 ms typical
Viewable Size 24" diagonal
Resolution 1920x1080 (1080P)
Viewing Angle 170 degrees horizontal, 160 degrees vertical
Power Consumption (operation) <20 watts typical
29 watts maximum
Power Consumption (standby) <0.15 watts
Screen Treatment Matte (anti-glare)
Height-Adjustable Yes - 3.94"
Tilt Yes
Pivot No
Swivel Yes
VESA Wall Mounting Yes - 100x100mm
Dimensions w/ Base (WxHxD) 21.47" x 18.26-14.32" x 7.25" (WxHxD)
Weight 8.86 lbs w/o stand
13.33 lbs w/ stand
Additional Features Optional speaker bar
Limited Warranty 3-year warranty standard
4-year and 5-year extended available
Accessories DVI, VGA[c] and power cables
Price $339 MSRP

As mentioned before, this is a refreshed G2410 with more attention to ergonomics, but with the same emphasis on keeping the product green.

That greenness starts right out of the box, as packaging foregoes polystyrene foam in favor of an intricately-designed cardboard cladding. The difference is actually more striking than you’d expect out-of-box; removing the monitor from its corrugated cardboard shell is a bit of a puzzle in some ways. It’s well designed however, and there wasn’t any apparent weakness that would lead us to believe it’s more prone to getting damaged during shipping than other packaging. Dell claims that they’re using less plastic in the box as well, which is difficult to quantify, but seems likely considering just how much cardboard is inside.

The display’s components and panel are also eco-friendly - the panel is arsenic, mercury, BFR, CFR, and PVC free. Most surprisingly, the chassis and bezel plastic is made of at least 25 percent post-consumer recycled plastic.


Packaging and construction are one thing, but what really matters to display-shoppers is how well the G2410H sips energy. Dell claims that their energy-sipping power supply draws less than 0.15 watts in sleep mode using VGA input, and under 20 watts at maximum brightness. Of course, this is also the logical reason for opting with WLED backlighting instead of CCFLs; energy consumption is less. There’s also an ambient light sensor, and three power profiles to balance brightness level against power consumption. At the end of the day, Dell claims that adds up to a 60% decrease in power consumption compared to the 50 watt drawing E248WFP.

The G2410H is relatively spartan when it comes to onboard ports - the only options are DVI-D and VGA. There isn’t any option for HDMI, USB, or even DisplayPort like we’re starting to see crop up in a surprisingly diverse array of displays. That’s a bit of a letdown, but it isn’t a game-killing omission for the display. If you haven’t gotten the picture yet, this monitor is definitely oriented toward energy-conscious businesses doing office and productivity work before all other.
 



Appearances and Impressions

Out of box, the Dell G2410H makes a good first impression, though you’ll fast notice that it’s a relatively straightforward design approach. It’s the same Dell styling, no-nonsense feel wrapped up in a classy but businesslike manner. The frame is matte black plastic, and although it’s made up of recycled plastics, you wouldn’t know it from how it looks or feels - it’s solid all over. There isn’t anything artificial about that.

Considering this higher-end stand is the refresh that merited the H in G2410H (for height adjustable), we’ll go over what’s changed. The new supplied stand, as mentioned before, is essentially the same as you’ll find with other height adjustable Dell monitors. Dell quotes a vertical travel of 4 inches, which is what we measured in practice as well. From the pictures in the gallery, you can see that the monitor goes all the way to the bottom (leaving a few mm of space), and all the way to the top, an impressive amount of travel. The mechanism is balanced just as it should be, requiring just enough force for adjustment yet enough tension to keep the display securely at your preferred height while rotating. You do get about ±30 degrees of rotation, which is welcome. Unless you’re using a VESA mount (which the G2410 and the G2410H do have) there’s no excuse for not offering a height-adjustable vertical stand at very minimum. It’s good to see that Dell went this route.

What’s puzzling about the G2410H is its aspect ratio. At 24” and 1920x1080, this display is 16:9. Considering that its market target is likely business and office productivity, we find ourselves wondering why 16:10 wasn’t a better choice. Compound the lack of HDMI or component video inputs, and the 1080P choice seems puzzling indeed. The preponderance of 1080P displays on the market has been overwhelming over the past year as HDTV standards have become the norm. As of this writing, just over 60% of the 24” LCDs on Newegg are 1920x1080. The deciding factor between 16:9 and 16:10 ultimately comes down to application. Console videogaming and HD movie playback undoubtably benefit from a native 1080P display; there’s less worry about the panel properly implementing 1:1 pixel mapping or having some bad scaler. On the other hand, it’s very arguable that 16:10 is the more dominant PC gaming resolution, and lends itself to more native side-by-side window productivity. Suffice it to say, for a business monitor, 16:10 seems the logical choice.

On the front of the panel are the OSD controls, and just above them is the ambient light sensor. The sensor lies at the core of the G2410H’s eco-friendly universe, modulating the backlight intensity with ambient light levels. Suffice it to say, this is something you’ll either love or hate. Rest assured that the LCD is still an energy-sipper regardless of how far you push it, but we found the ambient light sensor to be a bit too aggressive. The OSD is straightforward and responsive, and you’ll notice that “Energy Gauge” up top, which we’ll again explain in detail in a second.

Ambient Light Sensor - Love it or hate it, it's that circle up top

The G2410H has minimal input processing lag as we’ll show later, and we didn’t notice any delay powering up the LCD or changing resolutions. Display lag changing resolutions and detecting the appropriate scaler settings can be particularly annoying when dealing with BIOS POST (is it F2 or F12?!) or playing games at non-native resolution; thankfully we didn’t encounter anything greater than a standard 1-2 seconds.  This is (at least for us) a critically important detail that makes the difference between making it into our bootloader or BIOS menu instead of another reboot and subsequent gnashing of teeth.

Viewing angles are good for a TN panel, blatant color distortion doesn’t occur until you’re viewing the monitor from very steep negative vertical angles, a safe place to sacrifice. Horizontal angles are very good out to the extremes, with no visible distortion
 


First impressions with the G2410H are overall pretty good. It’s an interesting and unique display (that really does use little electricity) in a segment packed full of rather bland 24” offerings that fail to really inspire. But enough of that subjectivity, how really good is it?
 



G2410H Color Quality

We’ll start out with the color quality of the G2410H. As per usual, we report two metrics: color gamut and color accuracy (Delta E). Color gamut refers to the range of colors the display is able to represent with respect to some color space. In this case, our reference is the AdobeRGB 1998 color space, which is larger than the sRGB color space. So our percentages are reported with respect to this number, and larger is better.

Color accuracy (Delta E) refers to the display’s ability to display the correct color requested by the GPU. The difference between the color represented by the display, and the color requested by the GPU is our Delta E, and lower is better here. In practice, a Delta E under 1.0 is perfect - the chromatic sensitivity of the human eye is not great enough to distinguish a difference. Moving up, a Delta E of 2.0 or less is generally considered fit for use in a professional imaging environment - it isn’t perfect, but it’s hard to gauge the difference. Finally, Delta E of 4.0 and above is considered visible with the human eye. Of course, the big consideration here is frame of reference; unless you have another monitor or some print samples (color checker card) to compare your display with, you probably won’t notice. That is, until you print or view media on another monitor. Then you’ll notice you were doing it wrong the whole time.

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve updated our display test bench, adding some things, tweaking others. One of the most significant changes we’ve made has been to depreciate the Monaco Optix XR Pro colorimeter in favor of an Xrite i1D2. Though the Monaco Optix colorimeter is a tried and true calibration workhorse with slightly better instrument consistency, the sad truth of the matter is that there are no longer up-to-date drivers for modern platforms.

We also plan to augment the Xrite i1D2 data with a Spyder 3 colorimeter. This way, we’re absolutely certain the data we’re gathering isn’t biased by instrumentation, and because we’ve heard good things about the Spyder 3. Unfortunately, we can’t wait any longer for it to get to our doorstep for this review, and Dell has been patient with us ;). We also have moved to the latest version of ColorEyes Display Pro - 1.52.0r32, though in practice this shouldn’t make a measurable difference.

The key takeaway is that we’re providing data from other display reviews taken with the Monaco Optix XR alongside new data taken with an Xrite i1D2. They’re still comparable, but we made a shift in consistency of operator (yours truly is doing display reviews now), and instrumentation, so the comparison isn’t perfect. It’s close, though.

So, how does the G2410 do? Well, let’s dive into the charts. As usual, we’ve disabled dynamic contrast on the display, set the brightness manually to 200 nits (which works out to almost exactly 50% on the OSD), and contrast at default.









When we first setup the G2410H, the monitor was slightly cool in temperature. In fact, next to a few other calibrated displays, it was noticeably bluer. You can see that manifest itself in the uncalibrated results, which are rather high at 8.5 and show some peaks in the blues and greens (though the blues seem to be a difficult point for most monitors). Interestingly, the G2410H, try as I might, would not calibrate to a D65 (6500K) white point; repeated attempts on a variety of computers and versions of ColorEyes result in the LUT curves diverging and setting on a decidedly pinkish hue. Changing RGB values in the OSD and selecting from the few different options didn’t help, the outcome was still the same.

I’m chalking this up to the spectral performance of the WLED backlight. In practice, unless you’re dead-set on the white point matching adjacent monitors in a multiple-monitor setup, it’s not an earth-shattering deal, but unnerving still. After trying to make it closer to 6500, we eventually settled on using the panel’s native white point of around 7100K.

Calibrated performance is still totally acceptable for production at 2.01. Up against the considerably more expensive IPS panels we’ve tested, the G2410H doesn’t really stand out, but this is arguably very good performance from a TN display.

Finally, gamut is a bit disappointing at 64.95%. I was a bit shocked considering the LCD’s WLED backlight, until I found that Dell advertises 68% gamut coverage against a very similar color space to our AdobeRGB 1998 reference. We’re very close to that number, reference gamuts notwithstanding. It’d be nice to see much more coverage. Of course, a panel with RGB LED backlighting or CCFL could dramatically improve gamut. But possibly at the expense of burning more power and shattering the display’s “green” aura.

When it comes to color accuracy, the picture isn’t great, especially next to that IPS competition. There are some peaks above 4.0 and 5.0, which isn’t what we’d like to see in any monitor ever, but even the most discerning individuals would have a tough time picking those color differences out. Furthermore, keep in mind the target audience again; this seems like a productivity centric display.
 



Color Tracking Uniformity

Building on the 5-point testing we did in the Dell U2711 review, we’ve added testing at 9 different points across the LCD. To test this, we take our best center calibration profile and then test Delta E performance at 9 different places on the display.


 

We're adding a 3D plot visualization of color uniformity. As you'd expect, the top corresponds to top, right to right, e.t.c. as you would view the monitor normally.

We can see pretty clearly that calibration profiles are pretty localized - there’s a fair amount of deviation just about everywhere else. This is expected, especially since the display luminance isn’t the same everywhere, which we’ll illustrate later. We’ve shown in our previous Dell U2711 review that even the best monitors have this nonuniform color tracking; it isn’t to say that the display is worse at the edges, just different. Even at a Delta E of 3.17 at the most extreme, we’re still relatively in range, though much more would make a visual difference.



For gamers, display lag is a very real concern, and display processing is a nebulously reported (if at all) specification for just about all LCD displays. Ultimately, what matters isn’t GTG, full on, full off pixel response times, or what’s reported on the spec sheet, but the holistic latency of the monitor compared to something we can all agree is lag-free. In the past we’ve used the HP LP3065, which is an excellent baseline with almost no processing lag due to the absence of a hardware scaler, but we’re tweaking things around a bit (and yours truly doesn’t have said HP LCD), so we’re going to do something different.

One of the things we’ve seen requested pretty frequently is a comparison between the bonafide refresh rate of a good old CRT and LCD panels under test. I hopped into my time machine, took a trip to October 1999, and grabbed me a 17” Princeton EO700 CRT. This bad boy supports 1024x768 at a blistering 85 Hz. Oh, it also weighs a million pounds and makes weird sounds when turning on and off.

My ancient CRT - it's a beast

To do these tests, we connect the CRT up to a DVI to VGA adapter on our test computer’s ATI Radeon HD5870, and the LCD panel under test to DVI using an HDMI to DVI cable. I debated for some time the merits of using the same VGA signal, however, what really matters here is how the two display methods matter in the way that you, readers, are most likely to set things up. In addition, using the VGA input on any LCD is bound to add additional lag, as this is definitely a hardware scaler operation to go from analog to digital signaling, compared to the entirely digital DVI datapath. We run  the CRT at 1024x768 and 85 Hz, its highest refresh rate, and clone the display to the LCD panel.

We use the same 3Dmark03 Wings of Fury benchmark on constant loop, take a bunch of photos with a fast camera (in this case, a Canon 7D with a 28-70mm F/2.8L) with wide open aperture for fast shutter speeds, in this case at 1/800 of a second. Any differences on the demo clock will be our processing lag, and we’ll still get a good feel for how much pixel response lag there is on the LCD.

The only downside is that this means our old data is no longer a valid reference.

To compute the processing lag, I do two things. First, I watch for differences in the clock between the CRT and LCD, noting these whenever they are visible. I did this for 10 captures of the same sequence. Second, one can compute the processing difference by taking into account the FPS and the frame number difference:

Of course, not every one of those frames is written to the display, but we can still glean how much time difference there is between these respective frames with much more precision than from averaging the time, which only reports down to 1/100ths of a second. An example shot of what this difference looks like is the following:

The G2410H is a pretty decent starting benchmark for our brave new test method, considering at its core is a relatively normal S-TN panel. This is largely in line with what we expected to see, and on the whole, the processing lag is very small at around 9 ms. We’ll get a feel as we add more monitors, but this is on the whole very interesting.

Dell G2410H - Processing Lag
Averaging Time Difference FPS Computation Time Difference
9.0 ms 8.59 m

When it comes to actual pixel lag, we see with the G2410H what we usually see on all LCDs, one ghost image before and after the dominant frame, even at very fast shutter speeds so we’re not accidentally sampling the next. This still corresponds to roughly 16 ms. It’s interesting that the G2410H and other LCDs exhibit this ghosting.

At the end of the day, LCD performance still isn’t quite at parity with CRTs. But at the same time, I doubt anybody is going to want to borrow my time machine to buy one and replace their LCD. You’re getting a heck of a lot more screen real estate with a smaller, lighter weight footprint, for less electrical power, and you don’t have to look like a crazy doing it. Sure, there are a handful hardcore gamers out there that swear by their CRT’s faster refresh rate, but could a single one of them really discern individual pulses of a 9ms flashing strobe?



White and Black points, Contrast

For brightness, black level, and contrast points, we use the same colorimeter setup described earlier. Specifically, an Xrite i1D2 with ColorEyes Display Pro, and take measurements. Dynamic contrast is always turned off, as this throws off our results. We also let the panels settle in for a half hour at the respective settings before taking any measurements, though with WLED the wake up time is much shorter than a CCFL.







Black level is an important metric, since it directly represents the extinction ratio of the crossed polarizers in the TN cells. Remember, when a pixel is desired to be black, the photoelectric crystal in the cell changes linearly polarized light 90 degrees out of phase, so it is blocked by the polarizer. Higher extinction ratios (and thus better crystals and materials) result in lower (better) black levels.

We recommend running monitors at around 200 nits of luminous intensity, just because this is often where some of the best color tracking sits, and it’s enough of a balance to not result in eye stress from looking around the room and having your pupil adjust. As an aside, I personally am a bit of a light-crazy person and usually crank my displays brightness to the max (I consider 400 nits normal), but forget that I ever said that. ;)

The charts show the dynamic range in brightness, and the respective black levels at each brightness. What we’re really interested in, however, is the contrast ratio. We can see pretty quickly that the G2410H doesn’t meet the advertised 1,000 ratio, but comes close at 867. Performance is pretty consistent as well at both brightness settings.

It’s interesting that the WLED backlit G2410H doesn’t blow the CCFL backlit displays out of the water at maximum brightness. More than likely, Dell has engineered a display that uses as few LEDs as possible for the sake of power savings. The tradeoff there is that maximum intensity isn’t as high. For an eco-conscious monitor, we’re willing to accept that.
 



Black and White Point Uniformity

In addition to the performance a center, we’ve also added 9-point testing for brightness, both white and black. This is done the same way we measure color uniformity, except we only care about measured intensity. We set the monitor through OSD controls as close to 200 nits as possible, and then measured those 9 points.

Brightness - Black Uniformity

We do the same again for the black point, note that the difference in color in the table down below is exaggurated. Differences in luminosity of 0.04 like we see here aren't visible except with extreme scrutiny.



Overall, uniformity here is pretty decent. Our plots exaggerate differences, and in practice the G2410H has excellent black and white uniformity across the entire display at 200 nits, 100 nits, and maximum brightness. We weren’t ever distracted by any brightness bleeding, anywhere on the display.
 



G2410H - Nature’s Best Friend?

Thus far, the G2410H hasn’t really been able to shine - display performance isn’t bad, but it’s just average. Sure, it can hold its own among other more expensive contenders, but what about that green feeling you’re paying a $330 MSRP for? Thankfully, the G2410H really does impress when it comes to power draw.

We measure power consumption using a Kill-A-Watt EZ at the wall while just displaying the Windows desktop using minimum brightness and maximum brightness.



This blows away the other CCFL LCDs we have in our testbench. Clearly, Dell’s design decisions focused around really making this monitor a power sipper, and that it does. Our testing here verifies the power specifications given by Dell back on page one, besting the case with maximum brightness.

Now, what about that ambient light sensor?

Dell provides three different “Energy Modes,” which basically are scale factors the LCD uses to decide on a particular brightness. The LCD ships with the most economical of the three enabled, which is way too dim for my personal taste. There’s also a bar graph marked “Energy Gauge” which does a surprisingly good job of reporting power draw. Glancing back and forth between this and the Kill-A-Watt, it was apparent that there’s some real power monitoring circuitry at play here and not just a dumb brightness setting.

 
The bars change colors from green to yellow to red (where I sat most of the time, environmentally unfriendly person I am) as you crank up the brightness.
 

For these numbers, I measured the luminance of the room where I was testing (an average office with a number of full spectrum CFLs). I averaged about 22 nits of brightness using the i1D2.

Dell G2410H - Power Consumption
Energy Mode Brightness - White (nits) Brightness - Dark (nits) Power Draw (watts)
Energy Smart Plus 94 0.13 10
Energy Smart 108 0.14 12
Standard (manual) 259 0.32 20
Standard (maximum) 311 0.37 23
Standard (minimum) 78 0.09 10

Even in my relatively well-lit room, letting the ambient light sensor decide on a brightness results in luminance intensities at about our print (100 nits) standard. Quite honestly, this is way too dim for my taste, unless you happen to live in a cave or have hypersensitive eyes. For office work, the “Energy Smart” setting might be acceptable, but being uncomfortable and possibly straining your eyes isn’t worth the 8 watts of difference - just go unplug something else in the house and pay yourself with some well deserved photons. Keep in mind that if you do turn the lights off, the intensity is going to drop even more, and even with the lights off on the most conservative of settings, power use doesn’t drop below 10 watts.

No matter how you stack it, the Energy Smart Plus and Energy Smart settings seem very close to each other for meriting two different settings; a bit more range would be a welcome tweak.

 



OSD Tour

The G2410 OSD is thankfully very similar in layout and design to the other Dell OSDs we’ve seen before. We’ve already touched on the settings for energy conservation, which are admittedly well thought out and actually very accurate.

The rest of the OSD is thankfully relatively complete, though there aren’t settings for manually controlling the scaling settings and aspect ratio. This is perhaps the only possibly glaring omission, something we’d like to see on any monitor, no matter the price.



Scaling

Even though you can’t control it directly, the G2410 does a pretty good job scaling a variety of different resolution inputs appropriately. For the most obvious and common resolutions, you’ll see an aspect-appropriate fill scaling of the display. All of the common display resolutions above 1280x1024 resulted in aspect-appropriate scaling before the panel started stretching the image to fill the display. For example, 1280x1024 is the first resolution that results in stretch-to-fit scaling.

Resolutions below there, however, started acting a bit strange. At 1280x768 there is obvious stretching and failure to aspect-correct scale, as shown:

Going down further to 720P (1280x720) results in black borders around the image, and curiously the OSD reports a 1920x1200 60Hz input, even though Catalyst Control Center clearly shows 1280x720 @60 Hz. Underscanned 720P at 1776x1000 also resulted in black borders at all times. If you go back to our U2711 review, you’ll find that many of the same odd resolutions result in the same incorrect behavior, and we don’t really fault Dell for the display not scaling some of the odder resolutions properly; unless you’re using an HDMI to DVI cable, you should be running the LCD at native resolution.

Conclusions

The G2410H isn't going to set any records for color gamut or display performance, but it does deliver in the areas Dell promises it will - namely energy efficiency and green cred. Looking at the numbers, the G2410 sips power compared to the competition. It's obvious that Dell opted for WLEDs for their huge power savings over CCFL, and went on the ligher side to boot, since maximum brightness isn't overwhelming at 311 nits.

Average use - a mere 13 watts at the wall

It's an interesting niche that Dell is carving out here - businesses and people that want to live a "green" lifestyle can opt for paying a bit more, go with the G2410H, and get something that actually does draw considerably less power. This monitor isn't for avid digital photography enthusiasts or design/production professionals, but it does deliver performance and tangible savings that potentially appeal for energy conscious businesses and consumers.

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