Dell UltraSharp U2711: Quality has a Price
by Jarred Walton on January 22, 2010 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Displays
Impressions of the U2711
If you've used a variety of LCDs, you've undoubtedly encountered some that really impress and others that you'd just as soon avoid. The U2711 belongs squarely in the first group, with bright colors, excellent viewing angles, and good features. If you're after great image quality, the U2711 ranks right up there with the best that we've tested. That said, it's not necessarily perfect, so let's discuss a few areas that you might not be entirely happy with.
First, unlike many 24" LCDs (i.e. the Dell U2410), you don't get pivot functionality so there's no portrait mode… unless you buy a VESA compatible stand that supports the feature - and one that's also tall enough for a 27" portrait LCD. It's a minor concern for most, but it's still worth a mention.
Second, another minor complaint is the aspect ratio. Depending on personal preference, you may like 16:10 widescreen displays, 4:3 standard aspect displays (a dying breed), or you might be one of those that is very happy with the trend towards 16:9 LCDs. The U2711 is in the latter category, which is supposed to make it better for widescreen movie viewing. The problem is that a lot of HD movies are even wider, so 16:9 still doesn't fit a whole bunch of widescreen movies. Does the loss of 160 pixels in vertical real estate really matter much? Probably not, especially when you consider you're still getting 240 more pixels than other 27" 1920x1200 displays, plus being 640 pixels wider.
Third, there's the issue of dot pitch. I personally use a 30" LCD at the native 2560x1600 resolution. That gives the display a dot pitch of 0.251mm. You know what? It's too small for me when I'm working with text, so I ended up setting the Windows DPI to 120 instead of the default 96. That works well for some applications, but there are a few oddities. More to the point, even at 120 DPI I still feel a lot of text is too small, so I end up running Word and my web browser with 125% magnification a lot of the time. On the other hand, working with images is great with the high resolution - there's no beating Photoshop on a 30" LCD in my view (unless you have two 30" displays….) As you can imagine, if a 30" LCD with a .251mm dot pitch can strain my eyes, the U2711 with its .233mm pitch can be even worse. If you've got great eyes, you'll love the U2711; if you're like me and have less than perfect eyesight, you'll probably need to run at a lower resolution (or with magnification).
The final potential drawback with the U2711 that we want to discuss is lag. There are actually two types of lag we noticed during testing, and neither one is likely to be a deal breaker if what you're after is high quality image. Processing lag (a.k.a. "input lag") is definitely present, and it appears to be due in part to the digital scaler. Like the Dell 3008WFP, the U2711 supports a bunch of input options, many of which can't handle the native resolution. That means it needs a hardware scaler to work with lower resolution VGA and analog inputs. The result is slightly more processing lag than what we've measured on 30" IPS displays that don't have a hardware scaler. The other type of lag we noticed is a delay in powering up the LCD and changing resolutions. The LCD takes around 3 seconds to power on, but it can take an additional 3.5 to as much as 15 seconds to sync to the current resolution. It's extremely slow compared to many other LCDs in this regard. Fire up a game that runs at a different resolution than your desktop and you might have a black screen for up to 15 seconds (3.5 to 5 seconds is more common). Depending on how often you switch resolutions, you may or may not be bothered by these delays.
That's all the bad stuff that we have to say about the U2711, and while it might seem like a lot of complaints we really need to emphasize that most of them are very minor. For me, the dot pitch is probably my greatest concern, with the slow change between resolutions being a distant second. I've used LCDs that have very noticeable processing lag (i.e. Dell's own 2408WFP), and the U2711 never bothered me in that regard. (Others may be more sensitive, of course.) The ultra high resolution is very nice for images and movies, and if you've got good eyes it works well with text as well. We also felt that the support for non-native resolutions worked very well, and the fine dot pitch makes it possible to run the LCD at 1080p for example without a lot of blurriness. Finally, we continue to appreciate Dell's flash reader on the side of the LCD; sure, you can buy your own separate reader for $25, but it's very convenient to have the reader integrated into your display bezel.
Overall, we were very impressed with the features and colors on the U2711. It performs as well as any professional monitor that we've tested, with a price tag that's significantly lower than other professional offerings (e.g. Eizo). Professional displays often go through extensive testing, but that doesn't mean the U2711 is just shipped out with little in the way Q&A or testing. The U2711 is the first LCD we've had for review that includes Delta E results from the manufacturer. Granted, the target average Delta E of less than 5.0 wasn't as low as we would have liked, but Dell guarantees that you will get such a result without the need for any hardware calibration. (Our test unit result was also much lower than 5.0; flip to the next page for specifics.) If you're after even better color accuracy, hardware calibration will help (and we do have to note that our final calibrated result wasn't quite as good as some of the 24" to 30" LCDs we've tested), but this is one of the best displays we've seen in terms of acknowledging the importance of color accuracy. And if you want oversaturated videos and games, you can still select a different color mode and get results similar to what you'll see with typical consumer LCDs. In short, there's a whole lot of goodness in this $1000 "pro-sumer" LCD.
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Mumrik - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - link
This seems very odd to me:"While we know some of you would like us to compare performance to a CRT, few users have CRTs these days and all we're really interested in measuring is the relative lag."
That is an incredibly weak argument for not getting proper numbers. I don't get it - why don't you care?
Anandtech would never only show the FPS scores of the 5870 as a percentage of a benchmark GPU, so why do this?
JarredWalton - Sunday, January 24, 2010 - link
1) I don't have a CRT.2) I have limited space.
3) I don't want to have a CRT - I ditched all of the ones I had about four years ago.
4) I would need a CRT that can support resolutions up to 2560x1600 -- none I'm aware of handle more than 2048x1536.
5) CRTs are terrible at getting correct geometry. Pincushion and trapezoidal distortion are all too common, even after lots of time spent fiddling to try to get it "just right"... and if you change resolution or refresh rate, you have to do it all over.
6) If CRTs are faster, add 20ms or 40ms or whatever to my numbers.
Lag between user and display comes from mouse, GPU, CPU, and LCD, really - up to around 200ms in some tests. You'll never eliminate all of it, and even CRTs have some "lag".
Besides, no one is making new CRTs that are worth buying, so why should we continue to compare to them? FWIW, my five year old CRT was getting dim when I got rid of it, so I couldn't even use it for comparison anyway. I'd need a new, high-quality CRT to make the comparison even remotely meaningful.
Mumrik - Sunday, January 24, 2010 - link
Its not really an argument about the merits of owning a CRT. It's about having a proper zero to benchmark against. I don't really see what most of those arguments have to do with measuring a lag time and "I don't have a CRT" is a very surprising reason to see on what I consider one of the nets premier hardware sites. Anandtech always seems to have all the esoteric equipment in the world to work with, both hardware AND testing equipment...This is not some sort of personal attack on you by the way.
Also, it looks like Sony's FW900 will do 2560x1600.
JarredWalton - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Here's an email I just sent to someone else on this subject (with a few edits):As far as input lag and the HP LP3065, if you trust another source you can find an LCD where we overlap, look at their result and look at my result, and then add the difference. But then, I'm not sure what other source I would trust, because I have seen sites report some of the LCDs I have as a "0" as anything from 0 to 20ms. None of them go into detail as to how they're testing (i.e. what stopwatch program they use, and how many pictures they take and average).
Anyway, here's one comparison to a CRT with the LP3065:
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtop...">http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtop...
"I noticed no input lag at all with this thing. I took around 20 pics comparing input lag with a CRT -monitor and the worst lag I got was 24 ms, and the best was 0 ms."
So my choice of reference LCD has at most 24ms of lag compared to a CRT, and as little as 0ms, or perhaps an average of around ~12ms. But then, all CRTs aren't created equal, so what CRT do you use as a reference point?
I've seen other LCD vs. CRT tests where they post images of an 2405FPW and it gets an average of 35ms versus a CRT (http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1047842&...">http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1047842&..., which would mean the LP3065 is somewhere in the vicinity of 10ms average most likely.
Ultimately you're stuck trusting some source for your information about input lag. All I can tell you is that I've played a lot of games on the LP3065 and have never, ever noticed any form of lag. I've played games on a 2405FPW and barely noticed lag, and I've played games on the 2408WFP and definitely noticed lag. I could list a dozen more LCDs, and the fact is that not a single one has had less lag than the LP3065 in testing; they have only managed to tie it -- and many of the TN panels I've tested were recorded as "no lag versus CRT" at other sites.
If I ever find an LCD that has less lag than the HP LP3065, I'll make sure to mention it, but when I can confidently say that there's no current LCD that does better in that area, why beat a dead horse any more than we already have?
Every chart on the internet can be misleading if you don't know what you're looking at, which is why I explain in detail exactly what I'm doing. Plus, not all stopwatch programs are created equal; at best they are accurate to 17ms on an LCD, since it only updates the display 60 times per second. I tried one program and had results that were off by as much as 100ms, where I showed a difference of only 10 to 30ms with 3DMark03 as the time source.
So why not accept that the LP3065 is my zero point, and unless and until another LCD can beat it there's not much point in worrying about it. TN panels with "0ms lag" tie the LP3065, so it must therefore also have 0ms lag. If you trust my testing procedures, of course.
(And will I need to go over this AGAIN when I do another LCD review? A reference point is just that, and I can't find anyone that can give me a clearly better reference point. 10ms at most doesn't count....)
redbone75 - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - link
I don't even see how this can even be listed as a complaint, no matter how minor. To me, this ranks right up there with the classic complaining about the speakers on monitors. Should makers of ultra premium displays cater to people with less than stellar eyesight? Isn't the point of it all to be able to resolve finer and finer detail? It just sounds funny: "Man! This monitor is too sharp!"san1s - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - link
you are crazy, this is a valid complaint that should be noted in the reviewI'm glad that you have perfect vision- but many people, like me, don't. I would be angry spending my money on something only to find out later (since it wasn't noted) that I would have to change settings so becomes actually usable!
strikeback03 - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Well, resolution/pixel pitch is something each consumer should educate them on first. As it is a major point of this monitor, it probably isn't so much a complaint ("This is bad") as a caution ("This is something you have to know how to deal with")CSMR - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Yup, just "This is something you deal with by increasing the dpi setting" would be sufficient.Amazing that you get posters on AnandTech not understanding this. What will they say next? "Don't get that 1080p screen, your 720p movies will look small and your 480p dvd you can hardly see."
Voo - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - link
I disagree. Just because you have a stellar eyesight, doesn't mean the notice isn't justified, because this IS interesting for a lot of people.If it's so small that I have problems reading text that IS a problem for me and should be at least mentioned in the text. If it's not a problem for you, that's fine, you don't have to agree with the review in every point.
It just sounds funny: "I don't have a problem with it, so it's perfect for anybody!" Talk about empathy..
Voo - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - link
I disagree. Just because you have a stellar eyesight, doesn't mean the notice isn't justified, because this IS interesting for a lot of people.If it's so small that I have problems reading text that IS a problem for me and should be at least mentioned in the text. If it's not a problem for you, that's fine, you don't have to agree with the review in every point.
It just sounds funny: "I don't have a problem with it, so it's perfect for anybody!" Talk about empathy..