Dell UltraSharp U2711: Quality has a Price
by Jarred Walton on January 22, 2010 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Displays
Dell U2711 - Near Professional Quality at a Pro-Am Price
If you're a professional image or video editor, it's possible that the U2711 will fall a bit short. Specifically, we've seen better color accuracy, especially after calibration. For the price, we'd recommend looking at HP's LP3065, or one of the other 30" S-IPS displays. However, the U2711 does win out in quite a few areas. If you want a fine dot pitch, there's no better desktop LCD right now. The U2711 also supports 30-bit deep color with 12-bit internal processing; most displays with 30-bit color output cost twice as much! Look at the HP DreamColor LP2480zx for example: $1800 online and it's a 24" 1920x1200 LCD. (Note that we haven't tested that particular LCD; for the price we would hope color accuracy is better than the U2711, but we can't say for sure.)
Since the U2711 uses an IPS panel, viewing angles are a non-issue. Off-angle viewing isn't perfect, but it's far better than what you get from any TN panel and as good as any LCD on the market. Color quality and accuracy on IPS panels are also very good, and given the various compromises you can make we feel IPS is the best overall solution for LCDs right now. Very likely we won't get anything better until OLEDs, SEDs, or some other display technology takes over, and right now the cost of larger OLED solutions is prohibitively high.
Another great feature on the U2711 is the large number of video input options. HDMI, DisplayPort, and two dual-link DVI connections will be the preferred method of connecting, but you can also use VGA, component, or composite video. The ability to handle lower resolutions very well is a definite plus, though with a decent GPU you can often let the graphics chip do the scaling and not worry about shortcomings in the LCD's scaler. The problem with LCD scalers is that they also add a bit of latency. We don't know how much, but we do know that the U2711 has about 15ms more latency than other IPS displays that we've tested in the past. The latency may also come from the 12-bit internal color processing, but that would be part of the scaling hardware. Having seven different video inputs is going to be overkill for just about every potential user, but we could certainly see situations where using two or three of the inputs is feasible, e.g. PC, HDTV, and gaming console. The U2711 supports an optional audio bar along with audio out, but in either case you'll be limited to 2-channel audio, so you might want to look somewhere else for an ideal home theater display.
Aspiring imaging or video professional looking for a capable display will find the U2711 is a great option. We've seen better color accuracy, true, but few displays offer out-of-box colors that are anywhere close to this good. Dell guarantees every U2711 will have a Delta E of less than 5.0 without any extra calibration, and our test unit delivered an extremely good result of 2.24 (average Delta E). Buying a separate colorimeter and software will set you back another $200-$300, though you could then use just about any IPS or PVA LCD. The U2711 also delivered very good color uniformity. I still like the larger 30" LCDs, but then I have access to a colorimeter, I only need one video input, and I prefer a larger dot pitch.
We suspect "true" professionals will still prefer more expensive solutions that can achieve a Delta E of less than 2.0 for every color patch, but that's a very small market. If you're wondering if you might notice the colors where the U2711 "only" scores ~4.0, then you likely don't need to worry about it. In fact, we think most professionals would only "see" the problem if they had access to a colorimeter; you really won't notice any problems with the uncalibrated results using your naked eye.
 |
Bottom line is that if you're looking for a large LCD with lots of features, a high resolution, great colors, and what we feel is the best current LCD panel technology, the Dell U2711 should be at the top of your list. $1050 isn't chump change by any stretch of the imagination, but you won't find quality like this in a sub-$500 LCD. In fact, the only real competition right now comes from the 30" S-IPS panels that have been around for several years. If you want something a little smaller, or if you have a need for 30-bit color support, the U2711 is a better buy than anything else currently on the market. This is a great high resolution display that delivers on the quality and features fronts, and we're pleased to award the Dell U2711 our Gold Editors' Choice award.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
153 Comments
View All Comments
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.