Design and Aesthetics:
The Dell SE198WFP comes in silver-black colour. The panel has nice round edges and has 5 control buttons on the front. The power button has inbuilt indicator light. The indicator glows in blue colour when the display is active and orange when the display is in standby mode. The display stand is black in colour and looks good with curvy corners.
The stand can be attached and detached easily on the back with one press of a button. The stand has only tilt adjustment i.e. you can only tilt the panel up and down. You cannot adjust the height of the panel as there are no height adjustments. Take this into consideration while buying this monitor.
The controls on the front are a little hard to press and make some noise when pressed. This isn’t a big issue unless you like the soft (feather) touch buttons. The main menu has almost all the adjustments one wants in a monitor. Many adjustments work only while connected in VGA mode.
Features:
The SE198WFP is a 19″ wide screen LCD monitor and has the native resolution of 1440px x 900px. It has pixel pitch of 0.285mm, response rate of 5 milliseconds (ms), brightness of 300 (cd/m2 ), contrast ratio of 1000: 1, maximum sync rate (V x H) of 75 Hz x 83 kHz and has has a viewing angle of 160° / 160°. The monitors comes with built in video modes which can be selected using controls on the front of the monitor. It supports both VGA and DVI-D connections. Moreover, the DVI connector with HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection) ensures high quality image of protected high-definition content. It doesn’t come with speakers and USB ports which is pretty much de-facto in budget monitors. It also features VESA mounting holes for mounting the monitor on a wall with VESA compliant (100 mm) bracket. The connectors are also well placed, so attaching cables is very easy. The SE198WFP consumes 32 Watts of power in typical scenarios and 75 Watts maximum. It consumes less than 2 Watts while in standby mode.
Performance:
The Dell SE198WFP has excellent colour reproduction and the colours are uniform across the display including the corners. It has some what lesser viewing angle than being claimed by Dell (160° / 160°). Text appears very sharp due to it’s high contrast ratio. It played HD video very well with vibrant colours (compared to others in budget category) and DVD playback was pretty smooth. There was no smearing of colours in games and due to it’s 5 ms response rate we did not come across any clipping even in fast moving scenes.
What came in the box:
The monitor came with VGA, DVI-D, power cable for the monitor and speaker bar (optional), stand, manual and drivers CD.
The verdict:
The Dell SE198WFP is a pretty decent product in the budget range of monitors. It beats it’s competitors in product quality in it’s category. It comes with a price tag of Rs. 9700 ($ 119.00) + tax + shipping. You can also buy it from local dealers at a much lesser price which beats most of other brands in pricing too. If you want a decent LCD monitor then the Dell SE198WFP is the right choice.
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