“I have seen the top of the mountain. And it is good.”

So said Butt-head in an old episode of Beavis & Butt-head, and so I say it now.

After nearly crossing party lines and buying an iMac G5 with a tasty built-in 20″ screen, I was in a quandary. I had been lured by its sweet siren song. The iMac is a thing of beauty (as most offerings from Apple tend to be), and made the anti-Fanboy in me quiet down. Like Jason and his Argonauts, I was lured in, seduced by the sweet melody of the cool white case that contained everything I would need to compute in one thin package, including a dual-layer DVD burner.

But thankfully, my better sense prevailed. It’s a long story, but it ends with me not buying the Mac and desperately wanting a consolation prize. I am now determined to upgrade my PC over the next six months to something beefier than my good old Athlon XP 2100+ and adequate (if dull) Acer 17″ LCD display.

I found out that Dell’s 2005FPW WSXGA LCD display uses the exact same screen as the screen in the 20″ Apple Cinema Display (LG Philips Part #LM201W01). Having been wowed before by the pretty screen, I decided to look into it.

Dell lists this item for $749 list. They usually have a deal where anywhere from 15-30% is taken off that. Most recently, it was listed on sale for $524. Well, being the good shopper I am, I went looking for coupon codes at various sites, and found two useful ones. $90 off any $750 purchase from Dell Home, and 35% off the 2005FPW. Stacking them and adding some filler (a mousepad) to bring the pre-discount total above $750 brought my net total to $404, shipped.

This morning it arrived, and as I unpacked it I heard an angelic choir. I’m telling you, this was good in a way only sex and chocolate brownies usually are. I plugged it in to test for the usual dead pixels and something not so usual called “screen bleeding”. I won’t link to the myriad forum discussions dealing with large widescreens and this phenomenon, but basically it’s when looking at the screen, you notice light bands along the corners, top, or bottom. It’s basically you seeing the LCD’s backlight shining through, and it’s usually only visible when looking at a black screen. Only some units display the problem, and it seems to be a production issue, not a technical one.

I am happy to report that neither problem was present with my new toy. Not a single dead pixel, and no problems with the lighting. I was actually surprised at the lack of a single dead pixel. The LCD industry nowadays isn’t noted for zero-defect offerings, which seems incongruous considering the various pre-2000 laptops I have owned or worked on never exhibited stuck or dead pixels. One would think quality would improve, but I guess the old NASA adage is true: Fast, Cheap, Good; pick two. Fast and cheap won, I suppose.

Anyway, on to testing. The screen is capable of a decent 1680×1050 resolution, boasts a 12 millisecond response time, and has a contrast ratio of 600:1, which makes it pretty decent for gaming and video. It has VGA, DVI, S-Video, and Composite Video inputs (nice for just plugging a DVD player or XBOX into without turning on your PC). It also has 4 usb ports and functions as a USB hub, which is a nice touch for those of us tired of reaching behind our full-tower cases to blindly connect our MP3 players and the like.

The colors are crisp right out of the box, but if you want to adjust anything, the On-Screen Display is incredibly detailed, giving you control over pretty much any setting you’d want to fiddle with anyway. It was pretty in a way that makes anything short of a skimpily-clad Jessica Alba seem like something the cat dragged in. So much real estate. No words…. they should have sent a poet… And because of its excellent resolution, it is capable of displaying high-definition video. Did I mention it also has built-in Picture-In-Picture?

An excellent piece of equipment at what was an excellent price. Highly recommended.