Dell Crystal LCD Monitor
This is Dell's new fancy monitor, the “Dell Crystal LCD." I applaud Dell's willingness to put this one to market. Its design certainly makes a statement. — Here's why you shouldn't buy it: It's only a 22-inch monitor with a 1,680 by 1,050 resolution.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Crystal LCD lands at the end of a deliberate Dell reinvention stretch: after the blogosphere cast the company's cost-cutting era as a 'sin-suffer-repent' arc, Dell spent late 2007 chasing design credibility — the XPS One all-in-one drew direct iMac comparisons, and the next-gen 30-inch UltraSharp with DisplayPort and HDMI kept its high-end display line current.
Against that backdrop, the Crystal reads as a halo product: Boing Boing Gadgets credits Dell for shipping something that 'makes a statement,' while Crave calls it 'the supermodel of monitors' — but both reviews converge on the same verdict, that a 22-inch 1680x1050 panel doesn't justify the premium positioning.
First-order effects
- Buyers choosing between Dell's displays now face a split personality: the spec-led UltraSharp line versus a design-first Crystal whose panel specs trail its price tier, with reviewers explicitly steering purchases away from the latter.
- Dell gets the brand benefit it was chasing — proof it can ship Apple-grade industrial design — without needing the Crystal itself to sell in volume.
Second-order effects
- Rivals competing on design rather than price — the comparison set the XPS One already entered against the iMac — now have to answer Dell's monitor-side design play, not just its PCs.
- The Crystal's weak value proposition hands ammunition back to Dell's critics, testing whether the post-backlash goodwill from the blogosphere narrative survives a product priced above its specs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, desktop displays bifurcate into commodity panels sold on price-per-pixel and design-led halo products sold on aesthetics — with Dell using the second category to escape the price-war commoditization that defined its earlier 'sin' era.
- Design-as-differentiation becomes a durable part of Dell's identity beyond any single SKU, the same strategy the XPS One line applies to complete systems.
The trend: PC makers are shifting from spec-and-price competition toward industrial design as the differentiator, with monitors joining PCs as canvases for brand reinvention.