Sergei Mutovkin’s Rumbling Mumbling

My friends will prove this, I was dreaming of a new monitor for a very long time. The I started dreaming since the moment I saw the monitor that my wedding photographer Michael at that time it was Dell 2405FPW and I was quite impressed with what I saw. Photos taken by Digital SLR camera look Grand on such monitor. Meantime Dell has released a replacement model 2407FPW. Meantime crazy Dell’s “Days Of Deals” were passing by me whole summer with Katia not letting me to buy a new monitor, until recently when I finally decided that my old Viewsonic VX900 is no longer up to job after 4.5 years of “heavy” use (bought in June 2002). After a brief visit to Red Flag Deals I found out that there is 25% discount on the monitor of my dreams, I found a coupon on the forums and bought myself this new “gadget”. This time however, I did a research post-factum and found out that the monitor has extreme banding problem, i.e. a color gradient does not look smooth on screen and has distinct bands. A bit more research on Dell forums and it became apparent that the latest revision A03 is much better or problem is completely gone according to other accounts. So I waited till the moment I get this new Beast of the screen estate and check it out myself. So yesterday I got the monitor and late in the evening I got it connected to my MSI GeForce 6800 128Mb AGP Video card using provided DVI cable. In preparation to the new monitor I downloaded quite a few monitor testing programs and PNG images. Once connected I fired each of them one after another… what was a disappointment - banding was present and was more then obvious. I even started researching if I can return it to Dell and buy a new BenQ 24″ FP241W monitor. Finally before making a final decision I’ve booted my trusted Kubuntu 6.06. Loaded Eclipse IDE - what a beauty so much screen space, played full screen with Qt 4.2 Demos and as afterthought decided to create a gradient in Gimp. Wow, no banding… I was shocked and verified result with different colors - same result no banding. I’ve headed to the WinXP folder mounted in Linux and ran those same monitor test utilities using Wine.
Confirmed - Dell 2407FPW Revision A03 does not have banding problem.
What a pleasant surprise! So all the problem people experience with A03 are coming from the old evil - Microsoft Windows XP and its color management systems. Now I’m relieved, I will keep this sun-bright giant as my monitor and enjoy some of the pleasant bonuses such as built-in flash card reader and 4 port USB hub. In addition to that I was ultra lucky and my monitor has not a single dead or semi-dead pixel, those that looked like them were easily fixed with “Dust-Off” compressed air duster.