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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Getting a Dell monitor to work with my MacBook Pro

Ever since I heard Merlin had one of those Dell ultrasharp displays, i've been craving for one too. So the other day I took the plunge and bought a Dell 22" SP2208WFP display. It's one of their newest displays with a webcam and mic. I thought it'd be perfect for my macbook pro consider the great reviews it has had. However, I've been running into lot of troubles. Aside from the fact that I had tremendous difficulty with Dell customer service and their shipping, but when I finally got the display it was Glossy, which was not advertised at all on their website. And on top of that it doesn't look anywhere close to what my display looks on the mbpro. It shows everything, but it's not very clear. Anyone know any good way to caliberate it? I do have Leopard installed if that makes any difference. I have tried caliberating it myself using the Mac caliberation method... I did try to use the macbook pro caliberation profile... but no luck with any of that. It still looks awfully different.. and it's hurting my eyes while typing this right now. Please let me know what you guys know. Thanks!
TOPICS: Mac OS X
bribri's picture

Hey guys, don’t know if

Hey guys, don't know if this helps but I just bought this monitor for my Powermac G4 running OS X Tiger. The webcam works fine out of the box, I just plugged the USB cable in and it works fine with iChatAV.

As for the display rendering text all crappy-like and being all around painful to look at: When I received this monitor it was indeed awful, text looked like it was being disintegrated and it was just kinda blinding. I was disappointed that it wasn't any better even after I calibrated the display on my computer.

However, I realized the main culprit was the color settings within the monitor itself. Changing it to "user preset" and bringing the red, green and blue levels down to 60-70 each (instead of the preset 100) completely fixed the problem! I think that its just an issue of the colors blowing out the screen and causing it to be far too bright and therefore ruining text. Now the display looks amazing and is better than that of my powerbook. Hope this helps!

 
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