Great picture, but Dell service is lame

I recently bought this 30" LCD Tv from Dell. I got it because it seemed like the best bang for the buck, and for the most part it is. The TV itself is small, relatively lightweight, and while I haven't measured it exactly doesn't actually seem to be 30" viewable area like it says, but I know it's a W3000. The box, TV, and when I hook up my computer, the display settings all identify it as a true Dell W3000 30" LCD TV. The most alluring feature that got me was the fact that you can hook up two different sources, in my case a PC and High-Definition Xbox/PS2 games with Picture in Picture/ Picture by Picture/ Picture on Picture. I don't know the difference between the three yet, but definitely a cool feature. The speakers come packed unattached, and you can either mount them away from the TV or attached to the sides with supplied mounts. Speaking of supplies, the TV comes with the stand attached, the speakers, speaker wire, HDTV connector, power plug, DVI cable, VGA cable, and S-Video cable. It's also supposed to come with a user's manual, which Dell decided to leave out of my shipment. When I called up Dell, they said I can download the manual, and would not mail me one. Dell is less than reasonable, I believe and I found it extremely inconvienent. Granted, I know plenty about connections, so I was up and running in minutes, but if you aren't a technophile you'd be more than annoyed if it didn't come with a manual. Well, at least once I DID turn it on, the picture was clear, vibrant, lucid, and any other words you can think of to describe one heck of a good picture! It beats out my 27" Samsung HDTV easily. The LCD is just.... so smooth! I played some Doom 3 on it, and the response time of the monitor is perfect, though I wish my computer could keep up with Doom 3 anyway. It ran flawlessly at 1280 X 768 resolution while I messed with movies, internet browsing and the like. The product is excellent, and I'd be hard pressed to find a problem with the hardware. Just don't expect much from Dell 'support'.



****Updated 10/22/04

After playing with this for a few weeks, I'm still quite satisfied with the sound quality, and overall picture quality. The images for dark scenes/black backgrounds seem washed out, mainly because LCD technology relies on a backlight. If you do a lot of high contrast stuff, then I don't recommend this. The Picture by Picture is useful, you can have one half running Mario Kart, while the other half is a completely different game/PC/movie/TV whatever! The only downside is having to choose which source you want the audio to play on, because you can't play both sounds at the same time! I'm still very satisfied with my purchase.