Dell 19 inch Flat Screen Monitor Review - Menu System
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The on screen display (OSD) or menu system is, quite frankly, beautiful; it is presented in full color and the font is smooth and easy to read. The menus are laid out in an intuitive way and can easily be navigated with the buttons on the front of the monitor. As well as being able to change everything that you'd expect, like the brightness and contrast, the phase and pixel clock and the position of the image on the screen, you can also adjust features of the menu itself, such as the language, the position of the on-screen display (default is center) and the length of time for which the menu stays on the screen. There is no picture stretch facility, although it automatically takes up the whole screen at its optimal resolution of 1280 by 1024 anyway so it's not a feature you're likely to miss.
You get several color presets to choose from, including standard RGB, a blue preset for text-based applications and a red preset for image-based applications. You can also choose your own settings here. One thing I like about the OSD is that the factory reset option is not just a blanket that resets everything; you can reset just the position, just the color, or if you wish, everything.
The Auto-adjust feature is very capable; this is run the first time the monitor is connected to your computer automatically, but can also be activated at any time through the menu. This will center the image on the screen and adjust the brightness and contrast for you. It works really well and no other configuration was needed after it had run for the first time.
For a monitor of this quality, you would certainly expect to pay above £200 ($400), but the Dell 1907FP can be bought for as little as £159 ($317), or even less if you're will to go with a refurbished model. I've worked with dozens of these monitors (they are the main monitor stock at the company I work for), and not once have I seen a single dead pixel on any of them. Little is more infuriating than getting a shiny new monitor, plugging it in and then seeing a few pink pixels on an image that should be white.
The product is Energy Star rated so the power use of the monitor is very low. Normal use will drink between 35 and 75 watts, so even its maximum use (with all USB ports and the Dell Soundbar in use) is less than a standard 100W light bulb. It also supports an Active-off mode in which it uses less than 2W.
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