IN THE LAB^
REVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARED
ell’s newest 22-inch display—fl ashy
enough to win attention and awards
at this year’s Consumer Electron-
ics Show—retails for $1,200. Although it’s
called the Dell Crystal, the Dell Diamond
would be a better moniker because if you
purchase this display, you’re buying into
a marketing ploy worthy of De Beers. The
Crystal will cost you more than three times
the price of Dell’s $350 SP2208WFP, a
carbon-copy of the Crystal minus a sheet of
glass slapped over the front.
The monitor’s artful exterior looks great
on our desk. If only the picture followed
suit. Even aft er cranking the Crystal’s
brightness to the extreme, the 1680x1050-
native picture was unable to produce
acceptable diff erences in its dark grayscales
during our DisplayMate testing. This trans-
lated into a noticeable loss of image quality
and increased darkness levels in every
real-world test we ran: Details escaped our
pictures and movies; subtle lighting eff ects
smudged together in our games.The display’s tempered glass lends the
entire unit a mirror-like quality, more so
than any other glossy-panel monitor we’ve
reviewed. We didn’t notice refl ections
when the screen displayed bright content,
but when the content was predominantly
dark, as in Sweeney Todd, the refl ection of
our own visage, as well as everything else
in the room, proved mighty distracting.
While the display’s presets can shift
the monitor’s gamma factor to mitigate lost
details on the dark end of the spectrum, the
only two modes that do so—Gaming and
Multimedia—introduce a strange shimmer-
ing eff ect. It aff ects the entire quality of the
image, making fl esh tones look as if they’re
made of video static and reducing beautiful
gaming environments to an ugly, fuzzy mess.
One place we can’t fault the Crystal is
in its coloration. We loved the vivid look
of the display’s reds, blues, greens, and
whites. They liven up each image without
oversaturating the picture and make the
monitor look far crisper overall than other22-inch displays. We’d be willing to trade
the Crystal’s increased vibrancy for its
reduced grayscales if the display weren’t
wracked with other fl aws.
The Crystal comes with no functional
inputs: A single cord splits into four adapt-
ers for power, subwoofer out, USB (for the
included webcam), and an HDMI/DVI con-
nection. The included speakers and touch-
friendly buttons are pleasant additions to
the mix but do little to overtake the Crystal’s
surprising performance issues. –D AV I D M U R P H YDell Crystal Display
Mac users take note: This monitor is all looks, little substance
The Crystal’s tempered glass panel
is prone to smudging with minimal
74 | MAXIMUMPC | JUL 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com use. Get that Windex!
+ -
VERDICT$1,200, http://www.dell.com5
Beautiful exterior,
beautiful colors, and
an innovative design.Absurd glare, limit-
ed grayscale range,
distorting presets,
fussy touch-buttons.POP ROCKSDELL CRYSTAL DISPLAYLEAD CHIPS