Dell Crystal 22-inch Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor with Webcam Video

Dell Crystal 22-inch Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor with Webcam Video Transcript

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>> Hi. This is Eric Franklin, assistant labs manager for CNET Labs. And today we're looking at the Dell Crystal. This display can most easily be described as normal looking monitor with a 4-millimeter glass overlay over the front of the screen. Although we really like the look of the display, we don't like that the glass is easily smudged and attracts fingerprints very easily. The height of the screen cannot be adjusted; however, the screen does rotate back 30 degrees, which is good because one of the negatives about the display is that, while it has a very good viewing angle from each side, from above it has a really bad viewing angle. The display houses two speakers on each side within the glass overlay. And we really liked about the speakers is that they were really, really loud. However, because there's no subwoofer included with the speakers, when you raise the volume really high, the speakers tend to get very tinny. The OSD has a very elegant and simple interface that we hope Dell incorporates into some of their other mainstream displays. As far as features, Dell went for simplicity overabundance with this display. There's only one video cable included with this display, and by default this video cable is HDMI. However, Dell included an adaptor so that you can plug the video cable right into DVI port, if you want to. Basically, this display includes a one-cable solution. And this one cable splinters off into four other cables at the very end of it. It splinters off into a power cable, a video cable, a subwoofer cable, and a USB cable for your webcam. The included two-megapixel webcam is easily overlooked. It sits at the top of the bezel. The color-tracking test is a test that measures the amount of red, green, and blue in the display while the display is showing the grayscale. We found that this display had no signs of red, green, or blue while showing the grayscale, which is really good because most displays really struggle with this. DVD playback was clear and colorful, really impressed by the display's ability to reproduce color without over saturating the color. In particular, the bride's jumpsuit in "Kill Bill" looked really great. We really liked the Dell Crystal. It looks great. It looks very fancy. It has a very nice aesthetic to it. However, we don't like the price. The price is 1199. And for 1199 you're basically getting a 22-inch monitor that has limited connection options, especially when you compare it to Dell's other 22-inch monitor, which is the SP2208, which also did really well in performance -- almost as good as this display, the Crystal. Once again, I'm Eric Franklin and this has been the First Look at the Dell Crystal. ^M00:02:24