Dell SE198WFP  

It's taken a while, but LCD monitors have finally started to fall in price at a rate in line with most other IT products. LCD costs have fallen dramatically in the last 12 months, as Sony themselves whined about, which makes now a great time to invest in a new monitor. The Dell SE198WFP is one of the cheapest wide-screen monitors we've seen, and for the price it's simply amazing.

Design
The Dell is a 19-inch wide-screen which comes in the colour scheme mandated by computer law -- silver and black. For a budget design, it's actually quite easy on the peepers with a curved stand and solid base. The stand attaches quite quickly and easily at the back, and the monitor inputs are easy to access -- the stand itself also offers some cable management.

The stand has a 25 degree tilt forward and back, but there is no height adjustment on this model. Users whose desk is at a uniform keyboard height may want to invest in a monitor riser (also known in CNET.com.au circles as couple of textbooks). The controls themselves are clustered away in the bottom right of the silver bezel, and though small are easy to use.

Features
The SE198WFP comes without the bells and whistles of brethren such as the Dell UltraSharp 2007WFP, but also without the price-tag. With a budget monitor comes budget features -- it has a 1440 x 900 pixel native resolution, a DVI and VGA input, and a power socket for the optional speaker set, and that's it.

The panel itself is rated at 5ms, which means it should handle movement with ease, and it also has a relatively high contrast ratio of 1000:1.

The Dell also comes with HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection) compatibility which means it should replay HD content from a Blu-ray player or Vista PC without too much trouble. Theoretically of course.

Performance
Dell claims the monitor has "stupendous colour uniformity" -- which sounds a little like it wears its undies over its trousers -- but colour uniformity is indeed very impressive. Some monitors tend to darken in the corners, but the Dell copes well with displaying red and white screens, while blue tends to show an ever-so-slight darkness along the edges.

As with many budget, and not-so-budget, monitors, off angle viewing isn't the greatest. But we found that you'll get full brightness up to about 30 degrees either side of the sweet spot (60 degree total). The monitor doesn't "brown out" like some of its Taiwanese competitors, but only darkens a little off-axis. Dell claims the monitor has a 160 degree viewing angle, though it's a little less than this, and without a sextant on hand we'd say it was around 150 degrees before the display becomes unreadable.

Out of the box, the screen was set to "Normal" mode, and it was a little too blue for our tastes. Helpfully, there are a number of presets, as well as a User mode, which will help tailor the monitor to your tastes. Some of the modes are a little too vivid, though, and there is a little noise around text in some of the Video/Graphics settings.

Text is incredibly sharp, thanks in part to the higher than average contrast ratio, and the wide-screen format makes it much easier to place windows side-by-side for "better efficiency".

Pumping a high definition video feed through the Dell didn't show any sign of smearing or ghosting, and colours remained vibrant, though not as vivid as some of the higher-end monitors. We were able to view Blu-ray via the PlayStation 3 and there were no blank screens or other handshaking problems. Contrast wasn't up to the level of a plasma, obviously, but the night scenes in Mission Impossible III were rendered relatively faithfully. Gameplay was also OK, but there was some slight smearing in the Motorstorm racing game.

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