Conclusion

The DELL Ultrasharp 1800FP is a attractive, high quality LCD.  I am quite pleased with its performance, especially with its picture quality.  Not only did it perform well with movies, but also handled games quite nicely.  Watching movies on this LCD is pure bliss especially if you have been previously using a CRT display.  Its bright vibrant picture is just unmatched by any conventional CRT.  Its gaming performance was also impressive and should be a suitable LCD display for the average gamer.  Although its specs are not quite up to par with other current models, we did not encounter any major issues during our performance testing other than some moderate ghosting in our smearing test.   As far as its physical design, I don't particularly like the fixed angled stand.  It takes up slightly more desk space than other LCD's but obviously still an improvement over any CRT.  It's base is also rather large but I liked what they did with the bottom of it allowing you to effortlessly turn the display while maintaining it is the same position.  What's most attractive about this display is its price tag.  I've seen this display selling for as low as $370 which makes it a steal considering its high quality 18.1" screen.

Although this review was mostly positive, the DELL Ultrasharp 1800FP fell slightly shy of awarding it our "Extreme Excellence Award".  Why?  Well one major disappointment is the fact that ClearType does not improve its text quality.  In fact, text looks awful with ClearType enabled and I found myself having to settle for the standard method in Windows XP.  UPDATE 06/10/03:  One of our new extreme forum members suggested we use the web based ClearType tuner rather than enabling ClearType in Windows XP.  The text looks great now!  Why use the web based tuner?  Well, there are two types of LCD displays, RGB and BGR.  Although rare, the DELL 1800FP actually uses the BGR color striping order.  While Microsoft claims SP1 added support for these types of displays, the updated web based tuner does a much better job and allows you to fine tune the display even further.  I highly recommend anyone with an LCD display to run through it. The results are amazing.  I also don't particularly like the anti-glare and special hard coating the LCD has.  In our testing environment, it actually seemed to produce glare rather than prevent it.  I also find the coating a bit annoying when reading small text on a white background. 

The DELL Ultrasharp 1800FP is a low cost, high quality LCD display suitable for a wide range of PC users including multimedia users and gamers alike.  Highly recommended.

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