Dell G2410

The arrival of the G2410 marks Dell's return to our monitor tests.  As usual, the manufacturer has put its name to a monitor in a matte black frame. 

The G2410 includes a 5 ms TN panel with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, but the only possible movement is tipping the screen back a little.  It's impossible to move it up and down, or to rotate it to portrait orientation.  HDMI is conspicuous by its absence, making way for DVI and VGA, and there's no sound.  In short: it has all the hardware features of a standard 22'' monitor, and nothing else.

Gaming

Coloured    Transparent
Average ghosting over ten frames

With a 5 ms response time--which isn't amongst the fastest these days--there's not much chance of finding a very responsive screen.  That's an accolade reserved for 2 ms monitors.  Nevertheless, our tests seemed to show the opposite, but there's a straightforward explanation.  By trying to get the most out of their hardware, Dell's engineers have pushed the components too far, producing an effect known as reverse ghosting.  When black objects move across the screen, they leave a white trail behind them.  It might not look too bad in our test photos, but it's actually more irritating than normal ghosting.  That's why the G2410 can't score above three stars in this section.

Any games that involve rapid movement are best avoided.  For office use, though, or slower games, you won't have any problems.  If you like online gaming, you'll be happy to learn that we measured the input lag at under two frames.  That means you'll remain in charge of your gaming performance, not the hardware.

Colours

Default Colours

Ideal Colours

Our initial colour tests didn't leave much hope of being able to achieve accurate colours, either.  Again, there's a simple explanation: some shades suffer from a red tinge, while others are dominated by blue.  It's difficult to improve one with worsening the other using the OSD.  With its default settings, this monitor has a deltaE of 4.8.

For those of you that haven't been following, here's a brief recap of how a deltaE score works.  It's the average discrepancy between the colours sent by the graphics card and those actually displayed on screen.  In all but the most extreme cases, a deltaE under 3.0 is too small to be noticed by the untrained eye.  Even the best screens don't manage to get under 2.0

To return to the case in hand, the colours aren't awful, but anybody will be able to see the discrepancies without too much effort.  It's not a fatal flaw for the monitor, and a little calibration will improve matters.

''Maybe it's not that important for you, but for me ...''

Contrast Ratio (x:1)	Black Levels ( cd/m² )
100 cd/m²  200 cd/m²	100 cd/m²  200 cd/m²

In two years of testing monitors, this is a first for me.  This is the first screen that I've seen that has a contrast ratio that actually matches up with reality.  According to Dell's website, the G2410 has a contrast ratio of 100:1.  Whether that's at a brightness of 100 cd/m² or 200 cd/m², we measured exactly the same figures.  Dell deserves praise just for sticking to their advertised figures and not producing meaningless ads that claim contrast ratios that the products will never live up to.

Films

Here, our first concern was to check whether the reverse ghosting that affected games was problem in films too.  Fortunately, even The Matrix, full of exactly those fast-moving dark objects that cause this problem, didn't prove difficult.  There was still a lot of blurriness, though, and there is no attempt at upscaling.  Basically, this monitor doesn't stand out from any others when it comes to films, either for better or for worse