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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MadMan007 - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
Yup I wish more sites would go in to the implications of wide gamut but sadly it seems most just buy in to the MOAR=BETTER marketing hype. Given the depth of some articles at Anandtech it's kind of sad to see only the positives written, almost like marketing material, even if it is ostensibly in the context of professional use and applications.JarredWalton - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
I have never noticed any problems whatsoever when viewing images on a high gamut display, but perhaps that's because I have calibration tools available. On the U2711, if you're running standard applications, just set the LCD to sRGB instead of Adobe RGB and your LCD will be running in the reduced gamut.Again, I'm not sure how having a wider gamut is supposed to oversaturate colors. Just because a display has a potentially wider gamut doesn't mean you have to use it. Oversaturated reds and blues is a calibration problem, not something inherently wrong with having a higher gamut.
I've heard this complaint before, and I've just never experienced any problems with this. I've even searched for information on what you might be referring to, with no luck. If you use a standard sRGB color space on a wider gamut, you're going to only use 82% of the available gamut. There should be a mapping for reds to reds, blues to blues, etc. that occurs with the display regardless; red shouldn't suddenly map to bright red.
Anyway, if you have a link to somewhere that explains how you encounter this problem, post it and I'll go see if I can replicate this issue (with and without calibration).
10e - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
Sorry Jarred, I have to disagree with wide gamut not oversaturating colors in a practical sense, especially with a monitor that has multimedia aspirations like Dell's latest releases.I also have calibration tools, and one cannot "calibrate out" wide gamut on my Dell 3008WFP and NEC LCD2690WUXI. Wide gamut works fine with color managed applications like Photoshop, or color managed OSes like Mac OS X, but even using the Color Mgmt control panel and loading in the ICM profile in Windows 7 or Vista (or XP) only fixes the oversaturation in Windows Media Player and Picture Viewer, which funny enough ARE color managed. Ty using Media Player Classic and you'll see that it's different from what WMP 11 or 12 show.
This is because color managed apps perform color gamut transformation to correctly "map" sRGB colors to a wider gamut co-ordinate, based on information in the ICM profile. Because a wide gamut screen can effectively show a higher color intensity, a color that is R,G,B 255,0,0 will show a deeper red on wide gamut than standard gamut, because if eight bits per pixel is used, you have the same number of bits defining a wider color space than sRGB. In easy terms, the color difference between red at 254 vs red at 255 is more obvious on wide gamut screens.
Load a photo as your desktop background and load it into Picture Viewer in Vista or Win7 and you will see the difference especially with greens and reds. Even an ocean shot with lots of cyans and turqouises will show up quite obviously. I'm saying to do this, because I have made the same assertion before that wide gamut is not that big a deal, because I was fooled by the built in color viewer of Vista showing me correct colors.
I DO agree, however that using the sRGB mode for PC users and multimedia (console, BluRay) is best. Because otherwise the wide gamut will show up with stronger, unrealistic colors, similar to an old style TV with a color knob.
I have read reviews from other sites that listed wide gamut as being a plus, but I would have to disagree for about 90% of the population out there using tagged and untagged sRGB images.
The0ne - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - link
You have a perfect example imo. I use this quite often myself for testing."Load a photo as your desktop background and load it into Picture Viewer in Vista or Win7 and you will see the difference especially with greens and reds. Even an ocean shot with lots of cyans and turqouises will show up quite obviously. I'm saying to do this, because I have made the same assertion before that wide gamut is not that big a deal, because I was fooled by the built in color viewer of Vista showing me correct colors."
JarredWalton - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
I'm not sure about video playback... I just tried to compare a movie in WMP11 and MPCHC on a regular gamut LCD, and there's clearly a difference between the two. MPCHC looks somewhat washed out, with lighter blacks and darker whites. I'm not sure if WMP11 is doing some extra post processing or what.AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - link
Jarred, virtually all pictures and video were recorded in sRGB space. With 24 bit color, one pixel might be color 103x50x246. That maps to a different color than it should on a wide gamut monitor. Since wide gamut extends deeper into the red zone, the incorrect mapping will give more saturated reds.JarredWalton - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - link
It only maps incorrectly if your monitor is running in a wide gamut color space (both the monitor and OS) and it doesn't handle an sRGB image as being sRGB. If the applications is color space aware, you don't have a problem. Having a wide gamut monitor doesn't inherently cause the problem; in fact, if you have a regular gamut monitor you get the same effect. It's the images/videos and color space they are created in that can create issues.AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - link
Maybe my understanding is incorrect. The way I see it, regardless of what OS or application is being run, let's say you open a picture on a 72% gamut screen. The color is accurate. Now you crack open the monitor and replace the backlight with one that does 95% gamut. That same picture would appear different and more saturated, right? If so, that would be the case with all sRGB pictures out there, which is nearly every one.Even if software could "up-convert" a low gamut sRGB picture to be high gamut (by lowering the integer color values), for viewing on a high gamut screen, the end result wouldn't be a perfect match since we're dealing with integers.
JarredWalton - Sunday, January 24, 2010 - link
This is not correct. A high gamut screen has the potential to display a wider range of color, but it doesn't inherently do so. The backlight puts out white, and if it's a better white you can get a wider color range (more or less). But if you run in a limited color space, it doesn't make the colors map incorrectly within that color space. The problem only manifests when you view an image that maps to a different color space, and your image viewer doesn't adjust colors appropriately.There's a link above to a site that shows the problem. I can view the "wrong color space" stuff on a low gamut display as well as a high gamut display. So if you want an image to be viewable by your average Joe, you should use sRGB color space. Which, incidentally, the U2711 has a built-in profile calibrated to less than 5.0 delta E.
AnnonymousCoward - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
I really appreciate the responses =)After looking into this more, I think there are 2 things going on (which happen to relate to the 2 points in my last post). 1) If software isn't color managed, there's an incorrect mapping (see http://tinyurl.com/yk2h9uz)">http://tinyurl.com/yk2h9uz). 2) Even with color management, due to "bits of color" having finite numbers of steps, the conversion for display on a high gamut screen might not be 1:1 (see http://tinyurl.com/y8vocba)">http://tinyurl.com/y8vocba). It seems like #1 is the bigger problem.