Dell UltraSharp 2001FP Review
Dell UltraSharp 2001FP
Dell UltraSharp 2001FP
The 2001FP's design combines style and functionality. Sitting on a stable, silver, semicircular base, its slim, black bezel adds only three-quarters of an inch to the top and the sides of the display and one inch along the bottom. The 2001FP is highly adjustable, too: it swivels smoothly 45 degrees to each side, tilts 20 degrees backward and 5 degrees forward, and the telescoping neck adds about five inches of height. The push of a button releases the panel from the neck, which makes the 2001FP easy to store, transport, or connect to a VESA wall- or arm-mount. And as we've come to expect from larger LCDs, the 2001FP pivots from Landscape to Portrait mode, making legal-size documents and Web pages easier to view. Unfortunately, you'll have to download pivot software from Dell's Web site; we wish it had come bundled with the display. The onscreen menus are fairly easy to control using three small adjustment buttons on the lower right of the bezel; a fourth button selects the signal input.A true multimedia display, the 2001FP has loads of connections. It's compatible with PCs and Macs and accepts both analog and digital video signals (unfortunately, you can't adjust the contrast and some other image settings when connected via the digital video interface). Tube watchers can take advantage of the 2001FP's picture-in-picture capabilities by connecting additional video sources, say, a camcorder, via its composite and S-Video inputs. The display also sports four downstream USB 2.0 ports--two on one side and two in back--useful for connecting a joystick, a keyboard, or any other USB-driven peripheral. A pliable silver loop on the back is big enough to corral a handful of cables.
Text looked sharp in documents and spreadsheets and on Web pages. However, we found some bumps and spots in blocks of colors, and there were minor flaws in some of our grayscale tests. In our informal video-motion tests, the 2001FP didn't perform noticeably better than the other LCDs we've tested, despite its 16ms pixel-response time; although the streaking and ghosting was not egregious, there was detectable noise and some degradation of fine detail. Still, such flaws are present on all LCDs to some degree, and the 2001FP's image quality should satisfy most users.