Received E1705 Today: Better Display Available?

Now that I have the machine (received it today 5/12/2006), I can that the Dell matte finish is as terrible as people say.

There is a band in the middle of the display that's correctly displayed.. moving your perspective up or down you can see the banding (for lack of a better term).

The light bleed at the bottom is bad enough the task bar is faint, or has a washed-out appearance.

Watching a movie... yuck. The brightness control (of which there only appears to be a brightness and nothing else) is simply 6-8 steps to control brightness and it doesn't correct the light bleed or banding (I didn't expect it to, but I had to see if it helped).

Is the glossy version that much better? No light bleed? A consistent view when looking directly at the display? My desktop LCD fades a little when viewing from greater than 30 degrees but then I usually look straight at the display so it's not an issue.

It is an issue when you simply cannot view the entire Dell display correctly looking directly at it.

If you get a replacement LCD panel, can you get a decent one? This one stinks, to be quite frank. I would expect this kind of quality from a $300 starter notebook, but not what I paid for this.

EDIT: I will add, the machine executes like a desktop... it's hard to tell it's a laptop.. very quick.

 

I too got an e1705 with the non-glossy 1440x900 display, a few weeks ago. Mine is actually okay. There's a tiny patch at the upper right-hand corner of the LCD that looks like minor uneven backlighting, but otherwise it's fine, even with movies, and I wouldn't say this one thing bothers me at all. I figured 1920x1200 was too high a resolution and also didn't want to deal with the glare of TrueLife (I think it's called).
It might be worth going to the Dell site and keying in your service tag, which should tell you who made the LCD. Mine is an LG. I think the other maker is Samsung and I've heard of some problems with it, particularly with light leakage, I believe.
I guess if I were unhappy with the LCD, which is critical, I'd try to work something out with Del, or send it back.

 

FF045 LIQUID CRYSTAL DISPLAY, 17, WXGA+, VIDEO ELEC. STDS. ASSOC., SAMSUNG

I'm not saying that the "shimmer" affect you can see is the problem. Washed out color is washed out color. The banding is bad as well.

I've worked with various laptops from various mfrs. at work and it's been a while since I've seen a poor quality display like this on a laptop since we got rid of passive displays (the industry per se, not us).

I had a Macbook Pro for a short time before the harddrive died and I requested a refund and decided to go with a Windows machine. The display on it was great (as you would expect). It wasn't much different from the display I am using now (desktop 19in Viewsonic).

 

Hazel,

So far your you have defended yours and my choice of screens. I do not get to check mine out to after the 24th so all I can do is lurk and ask questions. I'm going to call Dell to see which LCD manufacture my machine is shipping with. I'm hoping others can answer my other post asking their quality opinion.

Thanks,

Mike