Dell's 2209WA LCD monitor reviewed, deemed king of 22-inchers

Dell's 2209WA just surfaced a few days ago, and already we're seeing the first review of said panel courtesy of CNET's Australian branch. The 22-inch IPS display was said to boast "excellent color and viewing angles and great gaming performance" at a fantastic price point, with the only real knocks being the omission of 1:1 scaling and the inset design which occasionally caused reflections. Yeah, minor quibbles indeed. In fact, reviewers struggled to even find those, and they were downright giddy to hand out a 9 out of 10 rating along with this strongly worded quote: "This is the best 22-inch monitor we've seen." 'Nuff said, huh?

[Nippero Posted Jan 15th 2009 4:53PM]

Genius =.=

Also, notice on Dell's site they dropped the Economy naming scheme from their new cheap monitors, the model numbers now start with S*.
Another thing, look at the base, it rotates. I dont think the E series had rotating bases...

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 15th 2009 6:35PM]

I wonder how this compares with Lenovo's L220x display? (22" 1920x1200 S-PVA panel)

Unfortunately it appears that Lenovo's L220x may have very recently been discontinued...I purchased mine only a couple months ago but a quick search shows it has been removed from Lenovo's web store.

[darkmax Posted Jan 15th 2009 8:28PM]

Boy! They must have reviewed really few 22" monitors..... Dell monitors are among the most expensive among competitors with similar features

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 24th 2009 5:37AM]

The reason is the IPS display panel - the liquid crystals in the panel move in a different way compared to regular TN panels, allowing for better color representation, but are more expensive. Very few 22" displays have IPS panels. Thus this display is considered "best" not because of the feature set but the quality of the images displayed on the monitor.

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 8th 2009 12:32AM]

Dell haven't dropped the E naming scheme from their budget monitors. Obviously CNET Australia hasn't tested the HP LP2275w, which uses an S-PVA panel and has a 92% colour gamut, higher than the Dell's. CNET (US) site said it was the best monitor they've tested. 1920x1200 resolution is too high for a 22" - the pixels are tiny, meaning everything in Windows is miniscule and running the latest games at such a high resolution isn't practical. Not all of us want to spend $500 on a video card - I'm much happier gaming at a slightly lower resolution. As for 1:1 pixel mapping, this could be useful if you play older games which don't support widescreen, but it's not an issue for any game from the last 5-6 years.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 9th 2009 6:01PM]

A higher gamut is not necessarily a better thing. You only get 16.7 million colors with an 8 bit path, and expanding the gamut just expands the distance between those colors. Furthermore, in cases where color isn't managed or untagged, the majority of images will appear oversaturated. Unless you're dealing with print or only care about how your images look on wide gamut monitors, it's a big pain. Therefore, the sRGB gamut of the 2209WA is incredibly well suited for the majority of users, including photographers interested in publishing to the web. A better question is build quality, and what exactly the reason is that this monitor is only listed in the business store at dell and not the home store.