The 24in. Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP delivers across the board in performance, design and features. It's not only an excellent choice as an entertainment display, but is also great for everyday Windows tasks.

Design
The Dell 2408WFP shares the same basic design as its predecessor, the UltraSharp 2407WFP. This includes the relatively thin bezel around the edge of the screen with the Dell logo along the bottom.

The on-screen display is easy to navigate and includes the usual options of brightness, contrast, colour and so on. We also liked that the OSD stays on the screen long enough to evaluate any changes you make while calibrating the display. There are also six included preset modes for activities such as playing games, watching movies and graphics work that affect colour temperature, contrast and brightness.

From the back, you're looking at a mostly silver enclosure, which runs along the foot and neck of the stand with a large silver Dell logo at the top. The screen rotates 45 degrees to the left and right, and about 30 degrees back. The screen also pivots 90 degrees to the left into portrait mode, but you'll have to rotate the screen back first before you can actually pivot it as the stand is in the way normally. This is a minor gripe, but it's something we hope Dell will consider when they choose to redesign this chassis.

The foot of the stand is the same Y-shaped (or 'bird-foot' as it's sometimes called) design as found on last year's model. The width of the stand is about 40cm at its widest and really helps to make the display feel very sturdy, even when placed on a narrow stand and the screen is raised to the top of its 11cm range. This display has many connection options, and Dell continues to make it easy to find them all. Each connection has a very clear illustration beneath it that makes it easy to find and connect.

Features
The Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP includes an abundance of connection options. For video connections, you'll find VGA, two DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, component and composite ports. There's also a speaker jack, four USB ports (plus one upstream USB port) and a flash card reader for Compact Flash and SD media. That's certainly a long list of connections, but if we're being greedy, we would have liked to have seen an optical audio-out connection. The extra DVI port and the DisplayPort are valuable extras if you want to connect the display to a media centre or high-end PC.

The UltraSharp 2408WFP has a Dynamic Contrast of 3000:1. This means — according to Dell — that the blacks the display outputs are three times darker than the whites are when viewing dark scenes. To get that kind of contrast ratio the display powers down its backlight in dark scenes, so that the blacks are very dark. This also means that if the dark scene in question contains areas of bright light, the light may be sacrificed as the backlight does not have the power to represent it accurately. Basically, Dynamic Contrast is just a marketing term and, for now, there is no independent standard for measuring it, so it should not be considered when making a buying decision. We felt the display was capable of dark blacks, but they could have been a bit darker. The whites were as bright as any we've seen in a recent display.

Performance
We tested the Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP through the DVI connection and it delivered high scores across the board in our labs-based DisplayMate tests, excelling particularly in sharpness and colour. Most monitors have no problem displaying legible fonts at 6.8-point and above, but things usually deteriorate as the size gets smaller. At 6-point, most displays have a hard time with sans serif fonts such as Helvetica, because of the somewhat curvy nature of the font. The UltraSharp 2408WFP is not immune to this issue completely, but it performed better here than some competitors we've tested. Its composite score of 90 on our DisplayMate suite of tests has been matched only by another Dell display, the 22in. SP2208.

The Dell had no problem on our Intensity Color Ramp test, which measures a display's capability to render gradations of primary colours smoothly, uniformly and consistently. The fact that the display did well in this test indicates that it will be able to display accurately different shades of the same colour in a given scene.

One problem we did see was when viewing the display on the Preset Mode Cool was that the screen looked too blue and unnatural. For example, when we typed in Word or viewed a web site with a white background, the page was not white, but very light blue. The effect was just too extreme, and should have been more subtle. This is a minor quibble, however, as there are six presets to choose from as well as a user-customisable mode.

DVD playback on the display was as good as we've ever seen on a monitor. Even when viewing medium shots with our eyes inches from the screen in Kill Bill Vol.1, we found the image retained its detail. We had a little PVP action while testing the display with World of Warcraft. It's hard to make this game look bad, and the 2408WFP continues the tradition of displaying WoW excellently. The colours, detail and image integrity were as good as it gets. We noticed a little backlight bleedthrough on the top corners in a pitch-black testing room, but saw absolutely none in normal room lighting.

Service & support
The £450 (inc. VAT) price includes a three-year limited warranty that covers defects in the display and its peripherals. This also includes telephone technical support as well as technical support through live web chat.

Copyright © 1995-2008 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CNET Networks, Inc. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CNET Networks, Inc.