The 20" LCD Shootout: Dell versus Apple

Quantitative Analysis

For the duration of this review, we connected the UltraSharp 2005FPW and Apple Cinema 20” simultaneously to a Radeon X800 Pro with factory default settings on both DVI connections unless stated otherwise. Brightness has been set to maximum as well.

Luminance

Brightness ranked as one of our most important display qualities. The largest mistake that we see people make when they buy a new LCD is to put their new, bright LCD in a dim, dark room (and then turn the LCD down to 25% brightness). Not only is this terrible for your eyes, but it also unnecessarily offsets hues; a blue screen in a dark room doesn’t look the same as a blue screen in a well lit one!

Below, you can see a comparison of the brightness for each of our LCD monitors.

Our Dell 2005FPW rates slightly brighter than the Apple Cinema display. This isn’t surprising, since we were told from both Apple and Dell that the monitors utilized different backlights. When we measured the watt usage of each monitor using a Kill-A-Watt device, the device indicated that both monitors used exactly 53 watts during operation.

Our Contrast Ratio

We will note the same observation from the 19” LCD Roundup two months ago. Using PreCal and our ColorVision Spyder, we will measure the luminance of a pure white image and a pure black image on the LCD monitor. The observed contrast ratio is simply the highest recorded luminance divided by the lowest. All measurements are in candela per meter squared; larger contrast ratios are more desirable.

Observed Contrast Ratio
	Highest Recorded (white image)	Lowest Recorded (black image)	Observed Contrast Ratio
Apple Cinema 20"	247.4	2.4	103.1
BenQ FP931	256.4	3.6	71.2
Dell 1905FP	234.6	2.6	90.2
Dell 2005FPW	280.4	2.6	107.8
NuTech L921G	278.2	2.6	107.0
Planar PE191M	234.0	3.0	78.0
Samsung 193P	230.4	2.2	104.7
Samsung 910V	219.8	2.6	84.5
Sony SDM S94	233.8	3.0	77.9
ViewSonic Q190MB	261.8	2.6	100.7

Contrast ratios were fairly close to what we expected to observe. The Dell display does emit whiter whites, but at the same time, our darkest darks were not quite there. Keep in mind, the accuracy of our ColorVision Spyder is only within 0.2 cd/m 2, and this plagues the accuracy of our results. Our numbers should give you a good estimation of where each display falls in line with another, but it is far from an absolute authority.

For those who would like to see how the Apple Cinema 20” and Dell 2005FPW compare head to head, we placed an image spanning both displays on the desktop and took a snapshot. The image below is the raw image before we cleaned it up for easier comparison.

Click to enlarge.

The next picture has been cropped to compare the two screens easily. The image on the left is the Apple Cinema 20”, the one on the right is the Dell 2005FPW.

Click to enlarge.

As you can see, even though both images are conveyed over the DVI cable, there seems to be some discrepancy on the actual tones. The more muted colors of the Cinema display were slightly off according to OptiCal, and we needed to correct the curves via software.