If you game, you might want to avoid the Dell Ultrasharp VA panel. It's got pretty notorious input lag, meaning the screen takes an extra 2 frames or so (50ish ms) to display what it was asked to. I have the HP 2475, great monitor but it is wide gamut so a lot of things look a little over saturated. I don't mind it in games but using a non-color managed browser like Chrome, IE8, etc. bother me to no end. Luckily, FF 3.0 and above support color profiles.
Specs don't mean much since manufacturers all use different methods so they aren't comparable. Measurements like brightness aren't useful either. Using a display at max brightness is like staring at the sun. Yet, manufacturers tout a higher brightness to show off specs and which also directly inflates contrast numbers.