New Dell 2707WFP

Hi again everyone..it’s been a while!

Once again, I was placed into a position of having to upgrade my system and once again I weighted the pros/cons of migrating to a Mac platform and once again after crunching the numbers…..I stayed with Dell.

This time I figured if I got a really good monitor and a pc system that would take me another year or two, the transition wouldn’t hurt as much since I could hang on to the monitor when I finally do make the switch….and it will happen…perhaps sooner than later.

To make a short story long…this most recent Dell purchase was by far my worst to date. Everything that could go wrong did including swapping out multiple mother boards and cooling fans to fix a hang on bootup. When that didn’t work, it was on to the processor and memory. And when that didn’t work, it was a replacement system. Add to that my accidental deletion of an entire JOB directory because I was careless and because my mouse pointer wasn’t pointing where it should have been in VISTA and you have another side story of finding file recovery software and service. The pointer was literally a quarter inch off to the right and down. I still laugh when the dell tech who was remotely controlling my mouse and selecting the wrong folders, said it looked "normal" to her. She had me reinstall the OS promising it would fix the problem…it didn’t.

Now the nearly good news and point of this post. The monitor I selected to one day take me to MAC land is the Dell 2707WFP. A very nice imitation of the Apple cinema line. The screen size is perfect! Not too big and not too small with resolution enough to do spreads without scrolling. However after Spyder2Pro calibration, the low end looks clipped and no amount of manual persuation or reconfiguring is changing what i see onscreen. Side by side comparisons using the same reference file with my old 2001FP are very noticable. the 2707 is just too contrasty down in the darks. The old Dell is using a VGA connection and running off an NVIDIA GeForce3 64MB card, wheras the new Dell is DVI using an ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT. My eyes are seeing better detail with the old setup!!

I can’t believe my old monitor is showing better dynamic range then the new 27 and so am asking what if any remedies I could try. Perhaps other calibration software/hardware but I doubt they would pull out detail that the spyder isn’t seeing??? Even the color is too punchy compared to the old monitor and I see no way of changing this in the RGB sliders. Tried them at the low range and at the high range but no difference in overall saturation. Now, it could be that my old monitor was off, but the printed photos I get back are generally very close, so I’m at a loss. Color settings in PS are identical as well…running sRGB color space. I like the monitor otherwise and would hate to send it back.

Would really appreciate hearing any advice on this and thxx is advance.