HP ZR24w

Ordered from costcentral.com. Just got my ZR24W from today. However, the monitor is DOA... Here is a picture showing the damaged CCFL (I believe)

Really bad luck...

Good old Georgia Tech. How I don't really miss those days. :D
 
I ordered the ZR24w from NCIX last weekend and price matched it to $376.99 CAD. Just picked it up today and I am pleased to say there is absolutely no dead pixel, no stuck pixel, no backlight bleed, nor any uniformity issues etc. The colours are really nice out of the box. The ZR24w is really bright as many people have said, and I had to turn it down to 30. The blacks, indeed, are not the deepest black, but it's NOT overly bad at all.

Only minor complaints are that the monitor cannot height adjust as low as the Dell stands and the monitor is quite thick in size, not in bezel. Also, the monitor response for sleeping or switching from booting to Windows is a bit slower than my old Dell. Otherwise, I'm loving it, especially for the price I paid for.

dL
 
That makes me weary... Couldn't you have tested them both before shipping the first back? When they were going to send me a totally different monitor because of their own screwup, they said I'd get it in two days and I could keep my original one until the replacement got there. Maybe it's because you're in the UK.

No, it's because my reseller made a mess of things. I was meant to get both the replacement and the dud one picked up on Friday but the replacement was delivered to the resellers warehouse instead of my home. Hopefully, this will not happen again...
 
just got mine. seems to have no dead or stuck pixels, and only a little blacklight bleed, but that's expected. the brightness is all the way down but damn it's still bright
 
Is it just me or is UAC refresh really slow for the ZR24w? Would a firmware be able to fix it or is the processor simply too slow to handle screen off/on?

dL
 
I ordered the ZR24w from NCIX last weekend and price matched it to $376.99 CAD. Just picked it up today and I am pleased to say there is absolutely no dead pixel, no stuck pixel, no backlight bleed, nor any uniformity issues etc. The colours are really nice out of the box. The ZR24w is really bright as many people have said, and I had to turn it down to 30. The blacks, indeed, are not the deepest black, but it's NOT overly bad at all.

Only minor complaints are that the monitor cannot height adjust as low as the Dell stands and the monitor is quite thick in size, not in bezel. Also, the monitor response for sleeping or switching from booting to Windows is a bit slower than my old Dell. Otherwise, I'm loving it, especially for the price I paid for.

dL

I tried to do exactly this a couple of days ago but now the place that was selling it for $376.99 has bumped their price to $428. Didn't find this out 'til I was at the Pricematch/Checkout phase at NCIX. Sucks ... now I have to wait for it to go on sale or something.
 
Alright, finally got a hold of the proper department. I have a tech coming out with a replacement panel in 24-48 hours, they're going to call an hour before they get here to give me time to get home from work. I'm sure it's going to be a big pain in the ass, but we'll see how it goes.

Did you guys keep your stand? He told me it would only be a panel replacement and to keep mine.

So anyway, I'll check for dead/stuck pixels with a program, check for backlight unity, color shifting with a blank page... Anything else to do on such short notice?
 
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Haven't posted in this thread in a while since I've been thoroughly enjoying my ZR24w. I thought I would post some impressions for those wanting to read every review they can. Here are my initial impressions.

PACKAGING
My box arrived in good shape. The monitor and stand were packed very well except for some foam bits flying around. Initially, I thought I had an open box because except for the plastic bag containing the warranty license, the plastic bags containing the cables were taped rather than sealed. The manuals were also not in pristine untouched condition. Combined with the foam bits, I was concerned. Before doing anything, I quickly came on here to look at some of the photos that have been posted and found that my monitor was packaged the same way. My concerns were quickly alleviated. I'm just so used to everything being in sealed bags. Backlight hours was at 0.

ORDINARY USE AND BACKGROUND
I mostly use this monitor for web surfing, casual PC gaming, and for watching downloaded content and DVD TV episodes. I have the monitor set up in a fully light-controlled room but I always use the monitor with some ambient light on. I have a projector for movies and my PS3 is currently hooked up to a 50" plasma at my gf's place. I can see myself hooking up a PS3 to this monitor in the near future when I steal my PS3 back from my gf and the scaling issue might bother me, but I think I'll live with that based on its low percentage use (I definitely recommend a big screen HDTV for PS3 gaming). I wish there was a wider height adjustment range and the monitor does wobble a bit when I try to raise the monitor height with one hand. But the monitor does seem to be very well built. Aesthetically, I think the monitor looks good, my gf thinks it looks awesome.

CONNECTIVITY
It has VGA, DVI, and Displayport (i.e. it's a computer monitor). I do wish the monitor came with speakers (however poor), and better yet a headphone jack since my PC is quite far away from my seating position. Having HDMI input would have been nice. Having both HDMI and component inputs would have been nicer. Having a memory card slot would have impressed the gf. :eek:

DEAD/STUCK PIXELS
I tried checking for dead/stuck pixels but individual pixels are so small it's really hard to tell unless I'm eyeballing it up close. And whenever I think I found one it turns out to be dirt (thank God). The coating on this screen also makes it hard to look for dead/stuck pixels. I'll keep looking but there's nothing apparent to detract from my enjoyment.

BACKLIGHT BLEED
There's definitely some backlight bleed to my untrained eye, especially in the lower left corner. It seems to come out worse whenever I try to take a picture of it. It hasn't bothered me yet during normal use. I don't think I'll bother exchanging for another one. Just don't know what material would make me notice the backlight bleed except when I'm staring at a black screen with the lights off.

CALIBRATION
The monitor looks good out of the box once brightness is lowered. The monitor does not display below black and clips above white. So brightness can be set to 0 and contrast cannot be set much higher than 90. Luckily, the point of clipping is very apparent so it's easy to set your contrast below clipping. I don't have a meter, but the monitor looks pretty good just adjusting the brightness and contrast setting alone. I tried a few settings posted here as well as elsewhere and ended up using flatpanelshd's settings with brightness at 0, contrast at 80 (I am playing around with my contrast settings and have lowered it somewhat), and some RGB changes. I did not use any ICC profiles, so TFT Central's settings looked washout to me. I liked Flatpanelshd's settings because the monitor displays a picture that looks close to the default, maybe a bit better mostly because it lowers the brightness a bit. If you find the monitor too bright, try lowering the brightness, contrast, and mild adjustments to RGB values.

TINT
There is an obvious pink tint when contrast is set too high. Even with contrast at 80, I see a slight pink tint looking at the Lagom white saturation. For this reason, I'm still playing around with contrast settings and currently have mine slightly below 80. Anyone with pink tint problems should lower their contrast to see if it fixes the problem.

BLACK LEVEL
I am not bothered by the monitor's ability to display black relative to other monitors mostly because I use my monitor for web surfing, casual PC gaming, and watching downloaded content with at least some ambient light. Now if I regularly use this monitor to watch movies with the lights out or if I was back in the old days when I was playing counterstrike competitively and the monitor's ability to render shadow detail prevented me from seeing my enemy, then this monitor's black level reproduction might be a deal breaker. Then again, I would likely still be playing on my CRT. The black level reproduction of this monitor has not detracted from my enjoyment of this monitor.

VIEWING ANGLES
Viewing angles are very good. Everything is watchable and readable even from extreme angles. I don't think anybody is going to have a problem with this. Hey it's an IPS!

GAMING
I haven't played any fast motion games on this monitor yet so I can't really comment. But so far so good.

INITIAL CONCLUSIONS
I am very happy with my purchase. I can see that adding two more of these for eyefinity would give me a pretty immersive experience. At its current price, I don't think you can go wrong with the ZR24w. It's not a perfect monitor but ultimately I don't think there are too many people here who wouldn't enjoy this monitor for desktop and gaming use.
 
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I love my ZR24Ws I bought thanks to this thread. I had a 19" Sony Trinitron CRT. Nice. Still works great (for sale...), but my wife said it was ugly :(

I haven't fiddled with the colors yet, but I set the brightness to 10 and the contrast to 97 on all three of them. Compared to a TN panel... well, there isn't a comparison. I suffered with some awful 19" TN panel LCDs while stationed in Iraq. Painful viewing angles and terrible colors.

DisplayPort a major plus. A necessity, actually, for Eyefinity use. I have no other IPS panels to compare it too, but it seems like a great monitor. No pixel problems on any of the three monitors.

It's actually having three monitors I don't know about. I'm actually thinking of ditching two of them and replacing with one 30" monitor so I'll have a 30" and a 24". Any suggestions?
 
I wonder why you guys are getting "crap" out of yours at those settings. On Win7, it defaults to the sRGB profile. TFTCentral's settings look real damn nice on my end. Saturation seems to be just about right. :confused:
 
Their policy is "deal with the manufacturer". Good thing these are business class monitors so HP has better service for them.
 
something ive noticed over the last few days, maybe my eyes have begun to adjust to the brighter monitor over time, or maybe the initial intensity of the back lighting has worn off. in either case, ive gone from a brightness setting of 10, to 30.

i dont want to say that the monitors gone from seeming dim, to vibrant, because its never been dim. its kind of like ive pulled a pulled a dingy plastic coating off it, and revealed whats really underneath. if that makes sense.
 
Did anyone else have trouble getting HP to even acknowledge this monitor exists? Every time I told them the model was ZR24W they asked me if I was sure, and didn't believe me. They were like, "On the front of your monitor you'll see 'HP' and then a number"

I said "Yes, that is HP ZR24W". I talked to 5 different people and none just accepted that as the model.
 
You may have called the Home and Home Office department rather than the Small & Medium Business department. For some reason one department has no clue what the other sells. :rolleyes:
 
something ive noticed over the last few days, maybe my eyes have begun to adjust to the brighter monitor over time, or maybe the initial intensity of the back lighting has worn off. in either case, ive gone from a brightness setting of 10, to 30.

i dont want to say that the monitors gone from seeming dim, to vibrant, because its never been dim. its kind of like ive pulled a pulled a dingy plastic coating off it, and revealed whats really underneath. if that makes sense.

Yes the backlight worns off fast in the beginning, i also had to raise the brightness after a few weeks in order to hvae 120 cd/m2 luminance.
Also one thing which actually annoys me a bit with this monitor is that it takes ages for it to warm up and get to full brightness when you have just started up the monitor, in the beginning when you have started up the monitor the brightness feels like - 50 (very dark) and then it sloowly gets brighter and brighter, after maybe 30 mins-1h it have full brightness, haven't actually measured the time..
 
This ZR24W is surely a nice monitor, but have anyone heard anything about the ZR30W ? :p
After googling around awhile I found it at least listed at hp's support and workstation site, click, and could even be seen in some pictures!
 
If the ZR30w comes with the same illumination / backlight bleed flaws, they're going to be even more noticeable due to the screen's increased size. If that holds true, then thanks, but no thanks.
 
I received my ZR24W a few days ago. This is a replacement for a 10 year old EIZO that died. So far I am liking it and the colors are good etc. my only concern is that there is just a little bit of hum from the monitor. When the backlight turns off, the hum goes away. It also is gone for brightness levels greater than 80 and from about 30 to 40. It is just slightly perceptible . I tend to obsess about any little problem with new toys so I am trying to just not worry about it. I don't want to send it back cause you usually trade one problem for another. Have any of you noticed this hum, as a function of brightness?

Thanks
homer_at
 
When i were watching TV today it striked me that TVs have sooo much better monitor quality than PC monitors, why is it like that?
There is no backlightbleed, no tinting, no IPS glow or anything even on cheap LCD TVs, plasma is even better, they have also good viewing angles.
So mankind is able to produce huge 50 inch TVs which can show PERFECT blacks, white, no backlightbleed, etc etc. but mankind can't create a tiny little 22" or 24" PC monitor which displays white as white and with no backlightbleed etc.
You can't blame the price either because you can get a 40" Full HD LCD TV for like 644USD or less. ZR24w is only a little bit cheaper than that, around 515USD.
 
Have any of you noticed this hum, as a function of brightness?

Can't say that I have, even when there is little other noise. But that may be because the ambient noise is still too much to hear anything.

The monitor is so bright that after a few days I turned down my brightness down to 10, so I'm not even close enough to your brightness levels to hear anything.
 
I've been following this thread and wanted to chime in that I got mine from Amazon, no dead pixels, no hum, good stand, no issues. I did notice it was rather bright at first, but not as bright as I thought it would be. I use a U2410 and another older dell panel at work, and as much as I dig that display I was rather concerned with the issues people are having with that monitor, but the one I have at work doesn't have any issues, and I do some photography but I didn't want to do wide gamut as all of the non-color-aware apps would have issue (games, etc).

Today I did some calibration using an eye-one display 2 in advanced mode, aiming for 120 luminance. I feel that things look better calibrated, as I did have generic sRGB settings for a bit, to see how that felt. I opted for the 100 contrast option, from reading tftcentral. I haven't tried their ICC profiles as I think my calibrated ones are better for my lcd, specifically. I couldn't attach the ICC file here, so I've put them here. My settings are 100 contrast, 0 brightness, R 137, G 83, B 100 if anyone wants to try them out. This seems to vary quite a bit from the tftcentral settings, but I figure that is the variances between individual lcds.
 
I have been following this thread since the begining and am getting pretty close to finally having all the funds to buy 3x ZR24w and a 5870. The only question I have is does HP treat the "Smart Buy" branded the same as the HP branded monitors the same when it comes to warranty? I have seen the Smart Buy branded monitors starting to pop up at the lower prices and the HP branded ones about 50-100 dollars more and want to be sure that the warranty is the same from HP on whatever I end up getting.
 
When i were watching TV today it striked me that TVs have sooo much better monitor quality than PC monitors, why is it like that?
There is no backlightbleed, no tinting, no IPS glow or anything even on cheap LCD TVs, plasma is even better, they have also good viewing angles.
So mankind is able to produce huge 50 inch TVs which can show PERFECT blacks, white, no backlightbleed, etc etc. but mankind can't create a tiny little 22" or 24" PC monitor which displays white as white and with no backlightbleed etc.
You can't blame the price either because you can get a 40" Full HD LCD TV for like 644USD or less. ZR24w is only a little bit cheaper than that, around 515USD.

Use a cheap LCD TV as a PC monitor for a while and I think you'll change your mind. The material shown on TV (lots of movement, almost never a solid color for very long) and your viewing distance from it do a lot to mask its flaws.
 
When i were watching TV today it striked me that TVs have sooo much better monitor quality than PC monitors, why is it like that?
There is no backlightbleed, no tinting, no IPS glow or anything even on cheap LCD TVs, plasma is even better, they have also good viewing angles.

I read AVSforums LCD sections. Full of people complaining about flashlighting, clouding, backlight issues.

Off angle issues like white glow are a lot more noticable when you sit 2 ft away than when you sit 10 feet away and their aren't many IPS TVs...
 
My replacement ZR24w arrived. My first one has debris sandwiched in the LCD in a rather annoying area (but no dead pixels). I'm happy to have this one arrive with no dead pixels and just one tiny bit of debris in a non critical area. I'm amazed at the few reports of dead pixels on this monitor.

There's one thing I haven't seen anyone mention yet. There's a 10 pixel band around the edges of monitor that is a darker shade. Even glancing at the windows clock you notice the poor back lighting around the close edges of the screen. Annoying for IRC and other applications I use that bunt any text or content to the edge of the screen. It might be a deal breaker for me in the long run.
 
When i were watching TV today it striked me that TVs have sooo much better monitor quality than PC monitors, why is it like that?
There is no backlightbleed, no tinting, no IPS glow or anything even on cheap LCD TVs, plasma is even better, they have also good viewing angles.
So mankind is able to produce huge 50 inch TVs which can show PERFECT blacks, white, no backlightbleed, etc etc. but mankind can't create a tiny little 22" or 24" PC monitor which displays white as white and with no backlightbleed etc.
You can't blame the price either because you can get a 40" Full HD LCD TV for like 644USD or less. ZR24w is only a little bit cheaper than that, around 515USD.

I read AVSforums LCD sections. Full of people complaining about flashlighting, clouding, backlight issues.

Off angle issues like white glow are a lot more noticable when you sit 2 ft away than when you sit 10 feet away and their aren't many IPS TVs...

Yep, low priced LCDTV's are crap compared to the technology behind a decent pc monitor, if you think it's better though nobody is stopping you from using one as a computer screen!
 
My replacement ZR24w arrived. My first one has debris sandwiched in the LCD in a rather annoying area (but no dead pixels). I'm happy to have this one arrive with no dead pixels and just one tiny bit of debris in a non critical area. I'm amazed at the few reports of dead pixels on this monitor.

There's one thing I haven't seen anyone mention yet. There's a 10 pixel band around the edges of monitor that is a darker shade. Even glancing at the windows clock you notice the poor back lighting around the close edges of the screen. Annoying for IRC and other applications I use that bunt any text or content to the edge of the screen. It might be a deal breaker for me in the long run.

You're the first person I've heard of mentioning anything about a shade band around the edge. Perhaps it's a specific issue to the unit they sent you?
 
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php
can anyone with this panel see the first two squares on their display?

All the blacks are distinguishable and white saturation till 252. This is with 0 brightness and 100 contrast set from monitor. Contrast from video card drivers are set to: R:86, G:88 and B:88. With those settings I get no tinting which is common to this monitor when using 100 contrast (or values close to it) and to avoid serious over saturation on the brightest colors. Good contrast values from video card drivers for RGB may differ slightly between monitors to prevent tinting. No ICC used.
 
Being able to resolve individual values between 0-255 on an LCD display is hardly a small thing IMO - it's a basic function of an 8 bit panel and people should absolutely expect it from an IPS display. A monitor which can display all individual 0-255 shades properly (and do so without visible banding) is the core basis for an LCD screen with good image quality.

Granted, it's kind of difficult to notice some black values are being dropped, especially if you're in a bright room, (reminds me of how many reviewers "missed" the initial problems with A00 U2410's where, along with the dither, it wouldn't show RGB values below 6 in certain modes), and it generally looks worse if higher values are dropped instead, EG if you can't resolve white values between 250 and 254 etc it tends to give things a slightly blown out look. But, either way, you're still dropping details and accepting that the 8 bit panel you've purchased isn't giving you 8 bit performance.. Use the right images (not just the handy Lagom tests) and you'll likely see the differences in quality when a screen does not drop these details.

I can't see the first 4 on my calibrated NEC 2490. People really shouldn't obsess so much over small things.

Perhaps, but you can argue from the other side too.. Far too many people calibrate things and create an accurate colour space at the price of image quality. What would the average consumer (not somebody attempting to match print colours etc) be better off with?

1) Something which reproduces all visible values the graphics card sends, and does so with smooth gradients and a roughly (but not precise) accurate colour space? Or..

2) Something which conforms very precisely to a defined colour space but which throws away a bunch of values to achieve this, in effect limiting the bit depth of that monitor to achieve the colour space, and (potentially) turning your nice 8 bit 16.7 million colour panel into something with fewer individual values, which may destroy any hope of discerning fine detail in things like the darkest or lightest shades, and perhaps limits your ability to tell subtle differences between other values it may duplicate, and which may well increase visible banding on certain images too?

I see people who, far too often, think that calibration and improving the image quality are mutual things. They are not.. Calibration usually means achieving certain defined colour/brightness parameters. But it easily has the ability to make your image quality worse in order to achieve those goals, depending on many factors..

What's amazing is so many people calibrate their colours without looking at precisely what it's actually doing to the quality of their image! If someone's got good work-related reasons to put colour accuracy above image quality in their priorities then I totally understand. But, if the limited controls/quality of the screen forces you to compromise on the image quality to achieve a strict colour space, then I'd argue it just doesn't make sense for the average consumer! They are far better off tweaking the screen to the best of their ability, colour wise, whilst attempting to maintain its ability to show all 256 unique shades of Red, Green, and Blue, and display smooth gradients etc.

My advice is people should use things like the Lagom images and CHECK what calibration is actually doing to the quality of your image! Yep, most of the time you won't be seeing those very darkest shades on an image anyway. But take a very dark scene from a computer game or something.. are you happy knowing you won't be seeing some fine detail in the darkest scenes just so you can say your colours are more accurate?

Of course, the answer depends on the person.. but the point is its best to actually check what calibration does, and to attempt to achieve the best balance you can between image quality and colour accuracy..
 
can anyone with this panel see the first two squares on their display?

I can't see the first square and the 2nd is faintly visible (you have to stick your face next to the screen)...3 and 4 are easy to see. On the white saturation test, I can also see 252 but nothing after that.
Monitor is calibrated w/ 0 brightness and 96 contrast (I still have to redo the calibration w/ a custom whitepoint).
 
For HP's business monitors like the zr24w, when they bring a replacement monitor to your home, it is a refurb or a new monitor, say for a replacement 1 to 2 months from purchase?
thanks
homer_at
 
Being able to resolve individual values between 0-255 on an LCD display is hardly a small thing IMO - it's a basic function of an 8 bit panel and people should absolutely expect it from an IPS display.

No Really. Not with standard 2.2 Gamut. Properly calibrated to 2.2 gamut it is completely normal to not see differentiation between the first few dark tones(though you may if you like a bright monitor and have dark conditions). This is no big deal and nothing to worry about.

Perhaps, but you can argue from the other side too.. Far too many people calibrate things and create an accurate colour space at the price of image quality. What would the average consumer (not somebody attempting to match print colours etc) be better off with?

Calibration doesn't alter color space (profiling deals with color space), it corrects the gamma curve. A correct gamma curve tends to look better and be more accurate. So I disagree with your argument.

What can lead the consumer to having a crappy looking display is trying to adjust it so they see every dark tone on black tone checkerboards, because someone told them they should, when in reality they are both messing up their gamma curve and making the display appear washed out.

Reality is windows standard 2.2 gamma is a fairly dark gamma, you will get a nice image with good contrast and pop. Though you may not see the first couple of dark tones in a 0-255 set.

Here is a Gamma Curve: Look closely (at 2.2 gamma in blue) at input range 0-10 and its corresponding output which stays flat near zero.

3161055122_Picture_1.png


Bottom line. If you have a properly calibrated 2.2 Gamma curve losing the first few dark tones is pretty much expected, Gamma 2.2 heavily compresses the dark end. Don't sweat it. It is a mistake to obsess over this and if you mess around with it you will likely create poorer, washed out image quality.
 
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