Color quality - Dell UltraSharp 2209WA

Color inversion

Color inversion is almost inexistent, which removes one of the most annoying problems of today's LCD technology. No matter how much you move your head around, the picture is rock stable, and all gray shades are displayed correctly, thanks to IPS technology.

Almost no inversion. Excellent.

Vieving angles

All is fine when viewing monitor from the front, up to about 30° angle. After this point, the picture starts to gain a gray glow, which slowly increases up to 178° angle. At the full 178° angle, the picture has a lot of gray glow, certainly much more than VA monitors, but retains a relatively good contrast which we would estimate to about 100:1.

Since most important front angles show a very good picture, with only slight glow in the corners, we will give this monitor a good mark for viewing angles. Unfortunately, the gray glow creeps up slightly even from front angle, but this isn't overly noticeable. There is high grey glow when viewing the monitor from 'corner' angles (for example, from up and right).

When viewing from front , left, right, up or down, the picture is almost perfect and the glow is not noticeable.

When viewing from left up, there is a visible gray glow.

Gray glow is most noticeable on dark images, and clearly visible. Above are shots from various angles.

Gamma curve and colors

Here comes another problematic feature of this monitor. The gamma curve is completely off at ideal 74% contrast, as you can see from the picture. It is not the case that gamma coefficient is set too low, or too high (albeit it is too low overall), the problem is the wrong shape of the gamma curve, which implies most inaccurate colors.

Completely inaccurate color curve, immediately noticeable.

Since this considerably reduces the picture color accuracy, we would recommend using the graphic card's lookup table to fix the gamma curve if you intend to use this monitor at 74% contrast (at 0% brightness 119 cd/m², contrast 791:1). To aid you in this process, we wrote the necessary instructions and created a suitable test picture, which can be found at this page. The fix will, of course, reduce the number of available color levels, and thus reduce the number of total colors, but overall, the picture color accuracy will increase, and there is no better solution.

We still have to warn, that changing the contrast setting affects both the gamma curve and color temperature, so in this case correct calibration is impossible if you need to change the contrast setting frequently.

If contrast is reduced to 50%, color curve looks much more accurate. We recommend this setting.

However, if contrast is reduced to 50%, the problem with color curve mostly disappears. Since this has beneficial effect to our other principal objection, we would highly recommend this setting. At contrast 50%, brightness 0%, the monitors brightness is about 80 cd/m², which exactly matches the sRGB standard requirements, color curves are acceptable, and this is even low enough to watch movies in dark room (72 cd/m² is maximum brightness for the purpose). At this setting the contrast is 533:1, which is also acceptable.

The monitor does not feature built-in sRGB mode, which we perceive as a big oversight. The closest available mode is graphic, custom which enables users to set R, G, and B intensities individually. When all three are at 100%, the white point is a bit too warm compared to D65 (6500K).

Lack of color temperature setting and sRGB preset has a strong negative impact on our assessment of color capabilities of the monitor.

Grayscale

Owning to IPS matrix technology, the grayscale gradient is excellent. Dark grays are very accurate, both in intensity and color. Darkest grays do separate in intensity, which is excellent. We were unable to perceive RGB(1,1,1), we are unsure whether this is a result of low contrast or this level is not displayed at all.

Very accurate dark grays.