MacBook & HP W2007 monitor

Question

After buying my GF a Samsung 216BW LCD for her WinXP system this Christmas and seeing how great that display looked, I started hunting for an external monitor to hook up to my MacBook.
On seeing how sharp, clear and detailed HP's W2007 monitor looked running Vista at a local electronics store, and being that I really like the MB's native glossy display, I purchased one of these 20" LCD's just over a week ago.
However, the display of this monitor driven by my MB isn't as sharp as I'd hoped for, and text looks especially fuzzy. In addition, any screen area showing what should normally be a smooth gradient of shades of the same basic color (like the grey menu bars at the top of most Mac OS X Leopard applications) is displayed as horizontal bars of different shades where you can see the color change from one area to the next. A really good example of this occurs while viewing the blue background of the website, tuaw.com, and the shade bars seem to flicker when I scroll up and down the webpage.
I have my MB connected to the HP display using the provided DVI cable and the mini DVI to DVI adapter that I purchased at an Apple store. Resolution of the display is the max. 1680 x 1050 pixels. I have also tried the Apple mini DVI to VGA adapter, but the display is even more blurry than through DVI.
I've also tried calibrating the display several times using the Apple ColorSync utility and this did help give a more lifelike look to some of the family portraits in iPhoto, but on the whole skin tones look blotchy with areas of bluish-green, instead of that natural smooth graduation in color that I know is there from viewing the same photos on the MacBook's own display.
If I had to sum up the problem I'm having, it's that the HP's display seems like 16-bit color (to borrow a Windows term) versus the 32-bit that I know (think?) is coming out of my MB. There just seems to be too much graininess to everything on this external display and it's spoiling my viewing pleasure..... besides giving me a headache!
Has anyone else had a similar experience with this HP monitor, or it's 22" brother, the W2207? I bought the smaller 20" model because the resolution is the same for both displays and I thought mine would look clearer as a result.
Is there some 'trick' to setting up one of these monitors, or could I possibly have a bad HP display and need to replace it?
Any and all help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Nigel

Answer 1

Exchanged my monitor for a new one of the same model tonight. Have it hooked up now and it is a big improvement over the prior sample. Out of the box colours are very good (family photos are realistic), but the horizontal gradient problem is still there - although to a lesser degree.
It can be seen in the the navigation banner at the top of this webpage and all application window headers, and while the blue background at tuaw.com is much smoother, the gradients are still there in the top 2-3" of the screen.
However, my other two "benchmarks" (iTunes Store webpages for 'Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End', and 'The Brothers Grimm') still show the above problem very clearly. The gradients appear in the grey area at top right for 'Pirates...', and throughout the whole page for 'Brothers Grimm' which shows coarse steps from top to bottom going from black to grey.
I think I'm going to give HP a call tomorrow to get their take on this matter.
On a positive note, neither of these panels had a dead pixel and while the bleedthrough on the first monitor was significant, this latest LCD has barely any.
If anyone can add anything else that I should be doing, or looking into, I would appreciate it.