Dell 2407 (Revision A02)

Be very, very quiet. We're hunting monitor revisions. This one's not quite perfect, but it's close.

The 2407 would have to be one of the most elusive monitors we’ve had to track down to date. Initially garnered with the A00 model, it was plagued with the now forum famous text blurring and hideous gradient issues. Added to this the screen took a long time to turn on, meaning that you rarely got to see your machine POST.

A quick call to Dell to find out if this was normal operation resulted in the monitor being whisked away for further testing, and the review was withheld pending a response. Two months later we have revision A02, complete with new firmware, and thankfully those issues are now gone, proving that yes, Dell does listen to its customers.

The first thing we noticed when placing the 2405 and 2407 side by side isn't just the 3007WFP inspired metal stand - but the fact that at its highest extension the older 2405 sits a good 11cm above the 2407. This doesn't mean that the 2405 has a greater range - indeed at both monitor's lowest extension the height difference remains unchanged, with the 2407's panel simply sitting closer to the desk. It is however a noticeable difference, with the higher reach of the 2405 feeling more comfortable to us tall folk.

Of course all the same panel adjustments remain, despite the design change - height, pivot, rotate and tilt are all there, keeping the Dell at the top of the food chain in terms of adjustability.

The buttons along the fascia are larger than its predecessor and almost sit flush – however they are now considerably more difficult to press. The menu they operate has also been revamped – but while it looks impressive, it is a pain to navigate and counter-intuitive, particularly when you’re darting about the different subsections altering the settings to suit your needs.

Inputs have remained unchanged, still providing VGA, DVI, component, composite and S-Video, as well as a refined card reader on the side and the four USB ports – this is still very much a convergent media panel.

Usability improvements are a mixed bag – an image now appears in the top left of the screen when an input is detected, which is neither here nor there, however annoyingly Dell has joined the ‘preset’ crowd, now offering ‘desktop’, ‘multimedia’ and ‘gaming’ modes. Desktop is what you'll want to keep it on to avoid the earlier mentioned gradient issues, as the Farjouda video processing has been turned off for this mode in the new firmware.

The preset mentality has further crept into the colour settings, where you can now choose from ‘Mac’ or ‘PC’ mode (presumably just temperature settings), as well as the previous sub menus of Normal (sRGB, we assume, but the monitor doesn’t tell us this), Blue, Red and Custom.

DisplayMate performance is now flawless, with visual clarity on par with the 2405, displaying the full greyscale range of 1 to 255, and still with the most impressive colour ramps we’ve seen. Blacks appear significantly better.

Gaming is where it’s at for this monitor though, and we can report that the refresh rate is markedly better than its predecessor, meaning large, acceptable widescreen gaming is now in the realm of the possible.

Unfortunately there still seem to be a few issues with the 2407 – for one, the component inputs simply wouldn't work with our Xbox 360, while others found the contrast simply too high compared to when the console is hooked up through composite. When we swapped the 360 over for the local MediaGate however, components worked fine – meaning that there may be a little work to be done on Microsoft’s side instead.

There have also been complaints about vertical gradients not being interpreted correctly, and after going through several different variations of vertical gradients we were finally able to replicate the problem with one particular example through the DVI connector – pronounced banding and a slight tinge of green and purple were present in the greyscale gradient compared to both the VGA input and the 2405. Hopefully the A03 will see the light of day soon to rectify both issues.

We can now happily call the 2407 a great monitor in its A02 revision, especially for those who want large, widescreen PC gaming bliss, and don’t mind sacrificing a teensy bit of image quality - but for us, until it fixes the aforementioned issues it just fails to reach the heights of its predecessor.