I've noticed the same problem on mine. I thought it was the integrated video card but I upgraded to a PCI Express video card and still the same issue. I've played around with some of the built in settings (sharpness, pixel clock and Phase) of the monitor and I did manage to tone it down but its still visible.

On Vista64, I found big differences changing options for "Effects", found at:

 

right-click desktop background

Personalize

Windows Color and Appearance

Open Classic Appearance Properties

Effects

Use the following method to smooth screen font

options are: off, Standard, ClearType

 

On my system (Vista64, 2408WFP) having ClearType on showed the best results. I use DVI.

Thanks all.

 

Mike5605, I actually meant that I already had on ClearType (mistakenly wrote TrueType).

 

I played with some of the monitor and graphic card settings but that didn't help, so I just returned them to default.

 

Photos looks good, but text just doesn't look as clear to me as I'd have expected. Not as "solid" as on my company-issue Latitude. 

 

Any more ideas appreciated.

some ideas:

 

- use DVI where possible

- if you must use VGA, use quality cables (analogue signals are affected by bad quality cables), and use the "Auto Adjust" for pixel clock / phase. the VGA cable that came with my Dell is not good, but I don't use it.

-wikipedia explains some of the differences on pixel "pitch" ("Closer spacing generally produces a sharper image as there are more pixels in a given area)". in my experience, the smaller the pitch, the more smooth the text. I went from a 20" widescreen (0.258mm) to 24" widescreen (0.270mm), and the 20" widescreen had pixels closer together and more dense, and did text better. I expected this though. I assume your pixel pitch is 0.282mm, not sure what the Latitude is.

- color settings can improve "halo" effects". some reviewers reduce these with calibration, some just play with the RGB setting till they get it right. google this and you can leverage other peoples work.

 

good luck.

 

I just discovered something quite interesting. I've always noticed that the text in the center of screen was much cleaner than anywhere else. So I dragged my browser where I see shadowy/smudgy text into the center of the screen and viola, it was clean and easily readable. Then it dawned me of course it was clean and easily readable because it was right in front of me and also that on Cnet they did state that viewing angles were pretty bad with this monitor so I decided to look at the screen at differen't angles and I noticed right away that depending on where you look at the screen the text would shift from looking normal to looking shadowy/smudgy! Example: I got up from my chair and looked at the text on top of the screen head on which looked clean and normal and then I noticed everything else on the bottom got shadowy/smudgy. I suppose this could be due to the fact that this monitor is a TN design. However I've never had this problem with Dell's past TN designed LCD monitors.