Gateway FPD2485W: 24" LCD Beauty or Beast?
by Jarred Walton on February 22, 2007 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Displays
Subjective Evaluation
Given that most users do not have access to hardware display calibration tools, we initially spent some time using the display without ever properly calibrating it in order to gain an impression of how most users would react. We thought we would start with our subjective evaluation before getting to the actual quantitative results.
Having used a Dell 24" LCD for a while now, the first impression we got is that other than a few modified features, there wasn't a huge difference between the Gateway FPD2485W and a Dell 2407WFP - or a 2405FPW for that matter. The addition of HDCP support will be important to some people, but the 2407WFP already has that. The Gateway LCD offers an extra component input, but the Dell LCDs counter by offering integrated flash memory readers. We would also give Dell the advantage when it comes to their On-Screen Displays - and ironically we prefer the 2405FPW OSD to the 2407WFP OSD. So our initial impression is that the Gateway FPD2485W really isn't any better than the existing 24" Dell LCDs, but neither is it worse.
As we used to display more, some of the extra features that Gateway added were noticed. It seems like 1080p support should be a given on any LCD capable of running at 1920x1200 resolution, and many people would like to have 1920x1080 resolution without any stretching. The Dell monitors can run 1080p, but apparently not with HDCP and without doing stretching; the Gateway display can manage HDCP with 1080p at a 1:1 ratio. That seems like a minor consideration, but some people have gotten pretty upset about the lack of unstretched 1080p support on 1920x1200 displays.
One of the other nice aspects about the Gateway LCD is that properly reported all of the standard 16:10 aspect ratio resolutions in its driver (1920x1200, 1680x1050, and 1440x900). At times, we have found it necessary to manually add some of those resolutions on other displays. All of the displays handle those resolutions properly, but frequently only the maximum widescreen resolution shows up with Dell's 24" LCDs.
Other aspects of the display weren't quite as promising. Running non-native resolutions seem to be pretty hit or miss. 1440x900 looked fine - a little blurry, but that's to be expected - but 1680x1050 didn't look good at all. It would probably be sufficient for video content or playing games if you're not too picky, but you definitely want to stick with the native resolution if at all possible. You can always turn off any content stretching if you prefer black bars over poorly stretched content, but the Gateway LCD could definitely benefit from an improved scaling algorithm for 1680x1050 content.
It generally goes without saying that there's always a bit of backlight bleed on LCDs. For the time being, the manufacturers have not yet been able to create an LCD that can fully block all light, so pure black never ends up being completely black. In some instances, this doesn't really matter, and games can actually benefit in our opinion. However, if you're watching a dark movie with the lights out, backlight bleed can be a distraction. The FPD2485W didn't seem to be much worse than other LCDs we've used, but then we noticed that the backlighting tended to be a bit more visible in the corners of our test unit. We took a picture of the display with black content showing to highlight the effect - while the image looks gray, the important aspect is the brighter corners; in person the center is relatively black. The backlight bleed in the corners was definitely worse than elsewhere, but honestly the only time we ever noticed it was when we walked in with the lights out while the "blank screen" screensaver was active. It never bothered us during games or movie watching, but other users might be less forgiving.
Overall, the display provided a good experience, but nothing that we would consider dramatically better than competing offerings. Playing games, watching movies, or simply doing web surfing or office work never presented any difficulties. The display is somewhat brighter than older LCDs like Dell's 2405FPW, but it appears nearly identical to the more recent 2407WFP. (Once you properly adjust the brightness and contrast levels, however, any brightness "advantage" is greatly diminished.) If you already have a 24" widescreen display, there's really no reason to consider upgrading to the Gateway in our opinion, but if you're already on the market for a new 24" display its definitely worthy of consideration.
Now let's take a look at how the display does in actual quantitative testing.
Given that most users do not have access to hardware display calibration tools, we initially spent some time using the display without ever properly calibrating it in order to gain an impression of how most users would react. We thought we would start with our subjective evaluation before getting to the actual quantitative results.
Having used a Dell 24" LCD for a while now, the first impression we got is that other than a few modified features, there wasn't a huge difference between the Gateway FPD2485W and a Dell 2407WFP - or a 2405FPW for that matter. The addition of HDCP support will be important to some people, but the 2407WFP already has that. The Gateway LCD offers an extra component input, but the Dell LCDs counter by offering integrated flash memory readers. We would also give Dell the advantage when it comes to their On-Screen Displays - and ironically we prefer the 2405FPW OSD to the 2407WFP OSD. So our initial impression is that the Gateway FPD2485W really isn't any better than the existing 24" Dell LCDs, but neither is it worse.
As we used to display more, some of the extra features that Gateway added were noticed. It seems like 1080p support should be a given on any LCD capable of running at 1920x1200 resolution, and many people would like to have 1920x1080 resolution without any stretching. The Dell monitors can run 1080p, but apparently not with HDCP and without doing stretching; the Gateway display can manage HDCP with 1080p at a 1:1 ratio. That seems like a minor consideration, but some people have gotten pretty upset about the lack of unstretched 1080p support on 1920x1200 displays.
One of the other nice aspects about the Gateway LCD is that properly reported all of the standard 16:10 aspect ratio resolutions in its driver (1920x1200, 1680x1050, and 1440x900). At times, we have found it necessary to manually add some of those resolutions on other displays. All of the displays handle those resolutions properly, but frequently only the maximum widescreen resolution shows up with Dell's 24" LCDs.
Other aspects of the display weren't quite as promising. Running non-native resolutions seem to be pretty hit or miss. 1440x900 looked fine - a little blurry, but that's to be expected - but 1680x1050 didn't look good at all. It would probably be sufficient for video content or playing games if you're not too picky, but you definitely want to stick with the native resolution if at all possible. You can always turn off any content stretching if you prefer black bars over poorly stretched content, but the Gateway LCD could definitely benefit from an improved scaling algorithm for 1680x1050 content.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
It generally goes without saying that there's always a bit of backlight bleed on LCDs. For the time being, the manufacturers have not yet been able to create an LCD that can fully block all light, so pure black never ends up being completely black. In some instances, this doesn't really matter, and games can actually benefit in our opinion. However, if you're watching a dark movie with the lights out, backlight bleed can be a distraction. The FPD2485W didn't seem to be much worse than other LCDs we've used, but then we noticed that the backlighting tended to be a bit more visible in the corners of our test unit. We took a picture of the display with black content showing to highlight the effect - while the image looks gray, the important aspect is the brighter corners; in person the center is relatively black. The backlight bleed in the corners was definitely worse than elsewhere, but honestly the only time we ever noticed it was when we walked in with the lights out while the "blank screen" screensaver was active. It never bothered us during games or movie watching, but other users might be less forgiving.
Overall, the display provided a good experience, but nothing that we would consider dramatically better than competing offerings. Playing games, watching movies, or simply doing web surfing or office work never presented any difficulties. The display is somewhat brighter than older LCDs like Dell's 2405FPW, but it appears nearly identical to the more recent 2407WFP. (Once you properly adjust the brightness and contrast levels, however, any brightness "advantage" is greatly diminished.) If you already have a 24" widescreen display, there's really no reason to consider upgrading to the Gateway in our opinion, but if you're already on the market for a new 24" display its definitely worthy of consideration.
Now let's take a look at how the display does in actual quantitative testing.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
77 Comments
View All Comments
jbr65n - Friday, March 14, 2008 - link
I purchased this monitor 11/2007. In 2/2008, the monitor completely died. I called Gateway and they refused to send me a new monitor. they would only send a refurb. (customer service reps were nasty, arrogant, and rude, when you do not agree with them they hang up on you).The second monitor did not work right out of the box, none of the touch control buttons lit up and they did not work, I had no way to turn the monitor on or off.
They sent a third refurb unit, and again, right out of the box, the backlight kept turning off, I would have to cycle the power several times to get it to come back on and then it would only stay on for a few seconds. Tech support said they would take back the monitor and the speaker bar add-on (since the speaker only worked on this one monitor) and refund my money for both. He transferred me to customer service to process the refund and returns and they changed there mind and said they will not give a refund. When I asked how long this was going to go on, there reply was "until I get a unit the works"
In all fairness, this is a nice monitor, but three bad ones in a row, and there lack of proper customer service, is enough to make anyone think twice!
timelag - Saturday, March 10, 2007 - link
Thanks, Jarred, for the informed review. A selfish request--could you review the current Dell, Apple, and Samsung 23/24" LCDs? A friend is in the market in the next couple months and I am buying before the end of the year. From what little looking I've done, these seem to be the best candidates so far for hobbyist photo work (and movie viewing, game playing, web browsing...).strikeback03 - Monday, March 5, 2007 - link
I purchased this monitor over the weekend at a local Best Buy. Here are my results from calibrating with the Pantone/greatagmacbeth Eye-One Display 2 colorimeter using the Eye-One Match 3.6.1 software.First I calibrated according to their instructions, which include driving the contrast to 100%. I had to go into user color and lower each color channel to 59 (default was 100) to get the brightness down. The brightness meter stated that it was at the target 120 cd/m^2, though the results show differently. Here are the results for the calibration:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/strikeback0...">http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/strikeback0...
And here is the validation results as an image of an Excel page. The Eye-One software does not give an easy way to directly export a graph, so colors tested are labeled by both RGB and Lab color values. Dunno how these compare to the values the Monaco Optix package uses, but by it's tests the results were quite good.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/strikeback0...">http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/strikeback0...
As the fist image shows though, the colorimeter was doing a lot of adjustment at the dark end of the spectrum, and video suffered from crushed blacks. So I tried changing brightness and contrast until video looked good, then recalibrating. Settings used here were brightness of 76 (with individual color channels still set to 59) and contrast of 60.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/strikeback0...">http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/strikeback0...
Much less work is being done to dark colors now, video looks good, and the dE is even lower now:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/strikeback0...">http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/strikeback0...
Brightness is still a little higher than recommended, but not much above what turned out following their procedure exactly.
Ferris23 - Tuesday, February 27, 2007 - link
I have this display and love it, but something I like to know about all my displays is how to access the service menu. Usually there are extra options that allow even more fine tuning with color etc...Do you have any connections that would be able to tell you the way to enter a service menu on this display?
Gateway "tech support" has no idea what I am asking and just send me spec sheets or links to what the OSD looks like.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, February 28, 2007 - link
Not sure what more could be done to fine tune the display. If you go to the user settings you can adjust RGB colors, but being an LCD it doesn't really make a difference whether you do that on the LCD or in the Windows drivers. They both end up accomplishing the same thing. I have never looked into "hidden service menus" on any of the LCDs I've used, I'm sorry to say.gandergray - Tuesday, February 27, 2007 - link
Jared:Thank you for the review. I'm very pleased that you will be reviewing monitors again. In your future LCD display reviews, I suggest that you identify the manufacturer and model of LCD panel in the monitor, and continue to identify the manufacturer and model of the signal processing chipset (you did in this review), as in Kristopher's November, 2003 "Dell UltraSharp 2001FP Preview: Gaming LCDs for the Masses" review. Finding information about an LCD monitor's panel and chipset is difficult at best. I suspect that many enthusiasts would often consider the panel type, brand and model when choosing monitors, if that information was readily available. In fact, I frequently read discussions about the merits of S-IPS panels over S-PVA panels. Additionally, would you also alert readers when a monitor manufacturer uses different types of panels in the same monitor, i.e., model. This practice is disconcerting; Consumers simply can't be certain that the specific model that they purchase will have a specific panel. I believe that a vocal outcry would eliminate or substantially reduce this practice.
Gandergray
gandergray - Tuesday, February 27, 2007 - link
My apologies-- Jarred.Googer - Monday, February 26, 2007 - link
Gateway offers a $29 extended three (3) year warranty for the FPD2485W making it the same as the Dell 2407WFP for $40 less.
JarredWalton - Monday, February 26, 2007 - link
The Dell is currently (or was last week) $675 with the three year warranty. The Gateway is $680 + $30 for a 3-year warranty. So right now, the Dell is clearly less expensive. If the price of the Dell goes back up (which is almost certainly will at some point), things change a bit.larciel - Friday, February 23, 2007 - link