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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ninjackn - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
The color gamut issues stems from issues with applications not using ICC profiles. It was a huge problem in windows XP because so few applications cared to use color profiles. It's gotten a lot better with windows vista/7 (or with OSX) but it still pops up from time to time, specifically with all those images on the web missing color information.Here's a website that shows what i'm talking about:
http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/e...">http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/e...
JarredWalton - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
Okay, I read through that, tried it on Firefox 3.5.7, IE8, and Safari 4. I get the problem now... it's not having a wide color gamut LCD, but rather viewing images that have an ICC profile in applications that don't respect those profiles, right?In terms of internet publishing, I'd have to agree that we need to standardize, and since sRGB is already the standard there's no point in going elsewhere. For an imaging professional where the content isn't going on the web, though, wouldn't you want the better color space? I always "save for web" if I'm going to post an image online, and that strips out any ICC profile information (AFAIK).
I need to go play with this on the U2711 with and without a monitor profile (and using sRGB and Adobe RGB) to see what effect - if any - it has on the experience. Stay tuned....
CSMR - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
Save for web should give an sRGB label and does with Photoshop CS3. No point in stipping it out.FF is color managed. As soon as IE becomes color-managed it will be fine to use any color spaces in web images. Microsoft has been fairly good about color management of late, so hopefully in IE9, fingers crossed.
velis - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
To me, this monitor is more interesting from a different viewpoint:It's one of the rare few monitors that offer 2560 resolution at less than 30" size. And even this one only has 109 DPI resolution.
If this monitor was 22 - 24" in size, I'd buy it without second thought.
Of course you need to run Word at 150% magnification, but the fonts look just awesome with so many pixels available to render them. Not to mention games. A "fairly powerful" graphics card is needed though.
The only problem is that current display managers, be it Windows or Linux are all still raster ones and can't really adapt well to increased DPI displays.
Perhaps if more monitors like this would show up on the market, MS and Linux gurus would finally develop true vector user interfaces. Then we could have 150, 200 and even more DPI displays. I'm wondering how many more years before displays catch up to what printers had some 20 years ago already.
CSMR - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
High dpi is very useable, even with normal pixel pitches 120dpi can be a good option. But yes vector graphics would make the benefit of higher dpi displays even greater.There is vector support in WPF since Vista so Windows is getting there at least.
Plus modern applications (including OS) tend to have raster graphics at various dpis, I think often including 150, so that is improving even without vector graphics.
But the fact is most people don't need very high dpi so we have to wait for the cost to come down. Also for displayport to become common once dvi reaches its limit and that will take a while.
dasgib - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
I'm really curious about to know if the matte displays of the U2711 has the known "anti-glare effect" which many people complain about on 24" IPS monitors (like the HP LP2475w and Dell U2410)?I don't like glossy displays (as most people do), but I had to send the stated HP display back because of that anti-glare effect.
MadMan007 - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
I have the HP and it's not bad as far as anti-glare coating although not the best I've seen - that would be a Samsung but sadly it was TN. It helps to sit a reasonable distance away, like a mere 2 feet or more. Every single Dell I've seen is far worse in terms of grainy anti-glare which is a shame because it means I can't consider Dell monitors at all, it just drives me too crazy to see whites all sandy-sparkly-grainy. It really makes me wonder how more Dell users don't even notice it at all.Maybe they've gotten better though? I'd sure like to know.
dasgib - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
I just asked Jarred about this via email. Hopefully we get an answer soon :)JarredWalton - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
I haven't noticed any negative effects from the anti-glare coating. I use a Dell 3007WFP normally and haven't ever noticed a problem there either. Mostly, I see the "grainy effect" on cheap TN panels, but maybe I'm just one of those people that isn't bothered by what you're referring to. Anyway, FWIW I feel the U2711 has the same appearance as the 3007WFP and I enjoy the picture. I don't notice "more graininess" or anything like that.MadMan007 - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
There may be some confusion here over the word 'graininess.' It is not a screen-door effect, pixel pitch by-product or defect in the actual image. It is the screen coating itself - it's not 'grainy' per se in the way a film might be grainy, it's 'sparkly' is my best word for it. Another way to describe it is if you took some sand and lightly dusted the screen surface with it - the image itself looks fine but there's always this layer above it that has its own effect on the image. It makes things 'sparkly' -tiny random dots of coloration across the specturm. For some people it may blend together, I don't know, but I can't see how it's possible to miss entirely. Dell's anti-glare is known to be heavby and particularly prone to this effect which is why it's brought up. Check out forum threads about Dell monitors and you'll find plenty of people noting it.Now someone who uses a Dell monitor all the time may get used to it especially if they never have another monitor next to it. But Jarred you surely have seen a variety of screens. Have you ever set them up side-by-side with your Dell? What about a laptop screen if you have one? Or if you have access to a glossy screen at least to compare, they by nature will not have any anti-glare coating problem.