Dell U2412M Design, OSD, and Viewing Angles

The look of the Dell is certainly utilitarian and not sexy. Unless you kept posters of 1980s-era minivans on your wall as a kid instead of a Porsche or Corvette, you are not going to find the U2412M to be an attractive display. But as we noted on the previous page, like those minivans, what it lacks in looks, it makes up for in utility.

Dell continues the menu system with four unlabeled buttons that control the OSD, and manages to make it fairly easy to navigate overall. I did hit the wrong button a couple times, so perhaps they could space them out a little more than they do, but overall the menu is easy to use and navigate. There is no switching between horizontal and vertical movements with the same set of buttons, which is a peeve of mine.

In our forums some users expressed concern about the anti-glare coating of the U2412M so I decided to pay extra attention to it. I have to say that I wasn’t bothered by it at all, and didn’t see anything to be concerned about. It certainly was nothing like the patterned retarder on passive 3D displays that drives me crazy from a close distance. If no one had mentioned the anti-glare coating to me then I wouldn’t have even noticed it was there. Perhaps I’m just not that sensitive to it yet and will become more so going forward.

Viewing angles are always a good area of performance for IPS panels, and you can see that in the included gallery. Overall the angles were good, with a loss of contrast at the extreme angles but nothing that you would notice in a normal working position, or even if someone was looking at your monitor for a presentation. Overall from a physical perspective the Dell was unexciting but didn’t cause any areas of concern that some other models have for me.

Introducing the Dell U2412M Delta E Testing and Why Our Numbers are Different
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  • ashugen24 - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    Wow!I really loved reading your blog. It was very well written and simple to understand. Unlike additional blogs I have read.

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  • auutumn - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link

    I just bought this monitor (Excellent) and I'm using it with a GeForce 670 graphics card and they're connected with a DisplayPort cable. Everything looks great but when I was looking at Office 15's Word and Excel, the ribbon and sidebar UI elements were fuzzy. I looked at these apps on my other monitor with DVI and everything looked great for a while then it also showed fuzzy text.

    Anyone else notice this and anyway to fix it?

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