Dell ST2310

Design and features

The Dell ST2310 looks a lot like Dell's own SX2210, with a glossy black bezel juxtaposed with its stark white backside. The screen has a slightly frosty matte finish with an anti-glare coating and the bottom of the bezel sits about 70mm from the desktop. Unfortunately, the screen height isn't adjustable and there is no screen rotation or pivot option for portrait mode. Its capability to tilt the screen back 20° is its only included ergonomic feature.

Connection options include HDMI, VGA and DVI. Also, there's an audio in and audio out port. They all sit on the back on the lower right-hand side of the panel and face downward. There is a small amount of chassis space between the connections and back of the panel that makes reaching the connections slightly more frustrating than what we'd like to see. As such, connecting the ports almost requires that you place the panel down on its screen to access the ports. Also on the back are audio in and out ports for directly connecting the monitor to an external audio device.

The on-screen display button array is located on the lower right-hand edge of the panel and consists of four buttons aligned vertically. Pressing any of the buttons brings up the OSD, which pops up parallel to the button array, and each option corresponds to one of the four buttons. Once a new menu comes up, the function of the buttons changes dynamically, as the top two buttons become the up-and-down arrow buttons used to navigate through the newly seen menu. Since any button labels for the OSD are on the screen (other displays typically label them on the bezel), calibrating the display in a dark room proved painless.

OSD options include the standard brightness, contrast, and various colour options. The presets are separated into two categories: Graphics and Video. There are six graphics presets to choose from: Standard, Multimedia, Game, Warm, Cool, and Custom. Its video presets are: Movie, Game, Sports, and Nature. The presets do not change anything other than the red, green and blue colour balance; therefore, how well each setting works is subjective. There are options to adjust the hue, sharpness and colour saturation as well as additional options for setting the OSD to stay on-screen up to a minute (useful for anyone who will spend a good amount of time calibrating).

The Dell ST2310's 16:9 aspect ratio supports a "Full HD" 1920x1080-pixel native resolution. This continues the trend of more and more monitor vendors moving towards 16:9 from 16:10 since high-definition content — in particular 1080p movies — can fit onto a 1920x1080-pixel screen in full-screen mode without stretching the image.

Performance

We tested the Dell ST2310 with its DVI connection. The display posted a composite score of 90 on CNET Labs' DisplayMate-based performance tests, coming just less than the 23-inch Asus VH236H's 93 score. The Dell performed well on most of our colour tests showing no signs of compression at the light end of the colour scale tests, indicating that it can distinguish between different levels of near peak white shades; however, the Dell had problems with dark grey and was not able to distinguish between very dark grey and black. In the dark screen test, there was apparent backlight bleeding or clouding along the top and bottom edges of the screen.

The ST2310 earned a brightness score of 203 candelas per square metre (cd/m²) — lower than Dell's claimed 250cd/m² rating for the monitor and also lower than the Asus VH236H's 283cd/m².

We used the ST2310's movie preset to check out Kill Bill Vol. 1 on DVD and a number of 1080p movie files from Microsoft's WMV HD Showcase. In both Kill Bill and the 1080p movies, we found that while the overall colour of flesh tones was close to accurate, details like snow and white fabric were darker than we wanted and almost looked grey in comparison with the Samsung SyncMaster XL2370.

We looked at World of Warcraft and Unreal Tournament 3 and noticed no signs of input lag, streaking or ghosting during fast movement; however, both games could have benefited from a brighter image, which the ST2310 couldn't deliver.

The optimal viewing angle for a monitor is usually directly in front of it, about a quarter of the screen's distance down from the top. At this angle, you're viewing the colours and gamma correction as they were intended. Most monitors are not made to be viewed at any other angle. Depending on its panel type, picture quality at non-optimal angles varies. Most monitors use TN panels, which get overly bright or overly dark in parts of the screen when viewed from non-optimal angles. The Dell ST2310 uses a TN panel, and when it's viewed from the sides or bottom, we perceived the screens to darken about 152mm off from centre. Of course, when viewed from the optimal angle, we had no problems.