General Image Quality

A special note: there will be quite a bit of photo and video images of the Dell 2408 in this review.
All those images are not intended to represent the monitor picture quality in regard to brightness, contrast, color accuracy, sharpness or color tone.
Trying to get a perfect photo of something on a monitor screen IMO is useless, as it never comes close enough to what is actually seen unless the photographer is a good professional. For a monitor review it’s just wasting time.
Pictures provided here are to show disproportions - things that are clearly seen in comparison and/or something obvious – like a distorted screen format.

The Dell 2408 features a VA panel. A couple of major drawbacks are attributed to this kind of LCD technology regardless the monitor brand name – from Acer to Eizo. Those are the loss of details in dark areas from the front view (become visible from angle view) and limited viewing angles – together composing famous “color shifting” effect.
There is no cure for this. Poorly made and poorly adjusted VA monitors may have terrible color shifting. Good VA monitors after calibration may give you accurate colors and… accurate color shifting!
For a quality test a reference monitor is necessary to prevent skidding from a no shoulder road. Unfortunately this happens even to a well-known test magazines when they neglect this rule of thumb.
The NEC 2490WUXi SpectraView with a standard gamut H-IPS panel is used as a reference monitor throughout this test.
First of all, about so-called 178o horizontal viewing angles for VA.
The diagram below gives a general idea about viewing angles/picture quality balance for VA and IPS panels.