The first thing that struck me when I saw the Apple Studio Display box was the similarity in colour to the Plymouth Prowler -- the purple one. Last week, Dell's flat pannel display arrived in a generic Dell box. In this case, you can judge a book by its cover.

From the beginning, the Studio Display oozed sex appeal, and at $1999, it better. The monitor is encased in a slightly curved, dark-blue translucent plastics, and the pictures you have seen don't do it justice. On the other hand, the Dell is traditional off-white and boxy.

The design of the plastics was well thought out. The stand is easily removed with a large thumb-screw (you do need a coin to get it started), and can be replaced with a stand similar to those on a picture frame. However, this stand seems somewhat flimsy and is fixed at a 15 degree angle. The main stand allows you to adjust the display's height from 15 to 19.3 inches, it also allows the display to swivel 45 degrees in either direction and pivot 45 an 10 degrees up and down respectively. Viewing angles are similar to TFT screens. The Studio Display also has audio in/out and video and SVHS in which are lacking in the Dell.

The Dell is nice, and very conservative in design. Its power supply is in the stand, making it permentantly attached, whereas Apple's is in a transformer. It has a swivel on the base of the stand, but cord drag tended to reposition it from where I rotated it. Both displays handle 1024 x 768 resolution -- in fact, they yield the best results at this resolution. Apple's requires connecting to the ADB port and could be a problem if you need a pass thru ADB like on a QuickCam. However, it does have two ADB ports on the stand.

Not only is Apple's display better in outward appearance, it also has a much better picture quality. This is probably due to the drivers that comes with the display. They enable very precise adjustments to the display. In a side by side comparison, the Studio Display is brighter than an Apple Multiple Scan Monitor. Most notably, it displays text much better than the Dell display, probably because I cannot fine-tune the Dell. However, I feel the tube has a slight edge on the display when viewing text.

Unfortunatly, I did have a few problems using both displays. The Apple display for no reason began to have problems with synching. A long call to Apple (who immediately escilated me to a second-tier tech) followed. We never figured out the problem, but after I unplugged the display, moved it and later put it back, everything worked fine, and still does. The Dell display would not sych at 1024 x 768 with my third-party graphics card, but did fine with the video port on the motherboard.

On the windows side, both monitors appeared about the same.

Aside from the sexier product design and audio/video input/output capabilities, the Apple display has a slight edge graphics quality. Where the Apple blows away the Dell is in it's ablity to properly render text.

follow-up:

After a few weeks of working with the displays, I have noticed a disturbing problem with the Dell display. The pixels have begun to acquire a "memory." This memory manifests itself as a ghost image, similar to a burned-in screen in appearance, which will persist if a window is left in place for about an hourand will remain for about the same time after a window has been moved. If the monitor is turned off and back on, the memory effect is reset.