I finally got on the flat-screen bandwagon and picked up a Dell 2005FPW this week ($450 out the door after some well-stacked coupons). Wow, wish I had done this earlier, so nice. (Not the best monitor ever, but still damn skippy).

• The screen is ultra-sharp, with a native res of 1680×1050 (WSXGA+). It uses the same panel as the new Apple 20″ Cinema Display, an LG.Philips with 7ms Tr and 9ms Tf, and 12ms gray-to-gray average response times (it’s fast, no ghosting, no blur).
• The screen is also ultra-bright. In a dark room, that means blindingly, eye-stabbingly bright. Turning the brightness down to 0 still feels like 80, and I had to knock down the color bars to around 60 and then pop some gamma in the video drivers to get it comfortable. In a darkened-room, there’s also backlight bleed, but in the day or in normal light, it looks really great. I’ll have to Spyder the thing to figure out optimal settings for day and night.
• I have a Sapphire Radeon 9800XT that had some problems w/ DVI locking and screen-blanking when rotating. The former I solved by checking the DVI frequency and alternate operation mode options, and the latter was a driver bug that’s been fixed in the latest Catalyst drivers.
• As you can tell, the screen rotation will increase productivity tremendously:

  

Overall, I’m super-happy with this thing. I was considering picking up the 24″, but that has a 1900×1200 resolution, and if I’m going there, I’m looking for something that’ll support HD (at least 1920×1080). There’s apparently some exciting stuff coming in the next few months, screen-wise, so we’ll see. Also, I reserve the right to wait for nano-emissive displays. 🙂