Real Kato Blog: Electronics: Dude, I Got a Dell

Normally, I would consider Dell products an abomination, a plague upon this earth. But in this case, I make an exception.

Dell PCs, in my experience, stink. I always find a piece of cheap plastic breaking somewhere or some connector coming loose. One of my co-workers had a Dell laptop. After a few months, the cursor would sometimes start to drift towards the corner of the screen on its own accord; the only solution seemed to be to bang on the corner of the laptop, as if spanking an insolent child. There were lots of meetings where presentations were interrupted by sounds of banging and cursing.

And, of course, there's that annoying "Dude, you're getting a Dell" guy. What ever happened to him? Maybe somebody spanked him until he shut up.

But last week, I did purchase a Dell product: a 20" wide-screen flat-panel LCD monitor, at a discount price of $600. Naturally, I would rather have purchased the similar Apple version of the monitor, but that one costs $1300. I can't imagine that the Apple monitor is twice as good as the Dell one. LCD screens for most manufacturers come from the same few sources in southeast Asia, so it's doubtful that the component differences are significant. So sorry Apple; I'm one of your biggest fans, but I just can't justify your price in this case.

The Dell monitor has a resolution of 1680x1050, it can switch from landscape to portrait, it has selectable scaling for 4:3 content, it has four different types of inputs (including DVI), and it has an attractive housing with a thin black bezel. The picture is bright and clear, and as far as I can tell there is only one tiny pixel anomaly; that's pretty good for large LCD screens, which can sometimes have as many as ten defects.

So assuming that nothing on this monitor falls apart in the next few years, I'd have to give this one a thumbs up.

Perhaps I'll put an Apple sticker over the Dell logo, though. I just can't stand to have that Enron-esque tilted "E" staring at me all the time.

Permalink