Dell U2711 - sRGB mode has unsaturated colors...

At first i thought that AdobeRGB would be the dogs bollocks... but i felt the colors were strange and whitebalance too blue...

I've now used sRGB for a week or so, but have noticed that colors are mildly unsaturated or slightly false.

100% Red looks 5-10% orange and 5-10% gray (desaturated)
100% Purple is also 5-10% off in both aspect
100% Green is not 'Supergreen'

if i then change preset to Standard or Multimedia the colors become highly saturated - too much in fact (maybe because im used to the sRGB desaturation) - Red, Green and Purple look correct though

what to do ?

changing color profile in Windows does nothing !... or im doing it wrong.

Since I am possibly in the market for U3011 or maybe the soon to come U3013, I am curious about your situation. Have you done any calibration yourself for either of sRGB or Adobe RGB? Or, are you talking about the factory pre-calibrated settings?

Thanks.

sRGB is fine on mine, matches my non wide gamut monitor perfectly and it's meant to be unsaturated, real life is actually pretty dull compared to digital colours.

@raminux:
I haven't done any calibration other than changing color profile in Windows Color Management (which apparently does nothing) so i've set the monitor on the sRGB profile and Windows in sRGB (default) mode

when viewing pictures, the colors are true to life, skin colors are natural, white balance is spot on, item colors are perfect... and best of all my iPhone4 which is sRGB display exactly the same colors - so i'm confident when producing photos for web, that they look how they should.

AdobeRGB is just rubbish, whitebalance is very cold, colors are off, saturation is off and theres a huge difference how things look from program to program... so i've abandoned AdobeRGB completely

I've been experimenting with the Custom profile, reading articles about the monitor were they explain at what settings i should get the most accurate colors... but i fear that i'm missing a Spyder3 hardware calibration to be sure that colors are OK...

I'm going to borrow a Spyder2 or 3 from a friend to calibrate Windows and the Monitor for perfect colors...

@Bratman
100% Red shouldn't look orange
100% Green shouldn't have a teal cast
100% Blue shouldn't be pale

Especially when the monitor is able to show fully saturated colors in other profiles...

sRGB mode on my u3011 is pretty underwhelming to me. I don't use it regardless if that's how its supposed to look or not, it just looks washed out and bland. The RGB mode on my U3011 is pretty good, I could live with it, but honestly, I found my best results with just some slight tweaking of the gain setting in the R,G,B in the Custom mode. The colors are likely just a bit more saturated than RGB but its pleasing to my eye and ultimately that's really all that matters unless you're a professional photographer in which case you should be using the sRGB mode anyway.

Montago said:

At first i thought that AdobeRGB would be the dogs bollocks... but i felt the colors were strange and whitebalance too blue...

I've now used sRGB for a week or so, but have noticed that colors are mildly unsaturated or slightly false.

100% Red looks 5-10% orange and 5-10% gray (desaturated)
100% Purple is also 5-10% off in both aspect
100% Green is not 'Supergreen'

if i then change preset to Standard or Multimedia the colors become highly saturated - too much in fact (maybe because im used to the sRGB desaturation) - Red, Green and Purple look correct though

what to do ?

changing color profile in Windows does nothing !... or im doing it wrong.

Click to expand...

Unless you can calibrate the monitor sRGB is the best option. I don't understand why you thought Adobe RGB would be so great unless you are viewing material formatted for that color space, really almost everything online is done for sRGB. The other modes are ghastly and yes the emulated sRGB is a bit desaturated in greens and reds but it is the lesser of two evils. Actually for a wide gamut monitor the u2711 does pretty damn good emulation but if you aren't satisfied by all means like I said calibrate it. As for color profiles mine will do nothing on my system as well unless I tick off the "use EDID" setting in my graphics card options (with a Radeon 7970)

StaticSurge said:

As for color profiles mine will do nothing on my system as well unless I tick off the "use EDID" setting in my graphics card options (with a Radeon 7970)

Click to expand...

Oh... that makes a ton of difference ... the selected profile from windows is getting applied, so right now i have sRGB in Color Management, when i click EDID ON and the monitor being in Custom profile, the colors get desaturized just like in sRGB mode...

However, i'm experiencing something weird now... again... When i put the monitor into sRGB mode i see gradient clipping in Green and Red (maybe also blue but i cant see it), Green is very bad :-(

I wonder if the reason is a bad DVI Cable or some ATI setting i've missed... i had the same issue in Windows 7 (now in 8) - dammit...

When you say your colours are "bad"... are you referring to what you see by eye and your own impressions? Or are you actually comparing to a reference colour sheet, or are using a hardware calibrator?

If 100% red seems too orangey in sRGB... well, sRGB might have orangey reds.

From what you're saying,

I haven't done any calibration other than changing color profile in Windows Color Management (which apparently does nothing) so i've set the monitor on the sRGB profile and Windows in sRGB (default) mode

when viewing pictures, the colors are true to life, skin colors are natural, white balance is spot on, item colors are perfect... and best of all my iPhone4 which is sRGB display exactly the same colors - so i'm confident when producing photos for web, that they look how they should.

Click to expand...

Well, the "desaturated" colours are exactly as they should be appearing. sRGB is a pretty poor colour space, but it's what we have and it's what's most common, and it's what the web works on. Are the reds on your iPhone 4 the same as the reds on your U2711 in sRGB? If so, there's nothing wrong with your monitor, or its sRGB mode.

aRGB is pretty much only good for photographers with hardware calibrated monitors, professional video cards, hardware calibrated wide gamut printers, using colour managed software and wide gamut cameras. You must have all of that to take advantage of aRGB.

The u2711 undercovers red and green, it's been measured on many review sites. I still use the sRGB mode because I don't have money to invest in a calibration and it is much better than neon colors in other modes. Gamma is also a bit low (2.0ish)

StaticSurge said:

The u2711 undercovers red and green, it's been measured on many review sites. I still use the sRGB mode because I don't have money to invest in a calibration and it is much better than neon colors in other modes. Gamma is also a bit low (2.0ish)

Click to expand...

The "neon" colors can be adjusted in the custom mode. Makes a world of difference really but I'm sure you already knew about this.

StaticSurge said:

The u2711 undercovers red and green, it's been measured on many review sites. I still use the sRGB mode because I don't have money to invest in a calibration and it is much better than neon colors in other modes. Gamma is also a bit low (2.0ish)

Click to expand...

Which reviews do you see that happening? The reviews I saw of the U2711 show little to no undercoverage of the aRGB spectrum, and no undercoverage of the sRGB spectrum.

The "neon" colors can be adjusted in the custom mode. Makes a world of difference really but I'm sure you already knew about this.

Click to expand...

I don't think you can properly compensate for the wide gamut, oversaturated sRGB content display of the U2711 using pure custom settings without screwing up something along the scale. You'd undersaturate colours that were fine before your adjustment.

I don't think you can properly compensate for the wide gamut

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That is true. The custom color mode just allows adjustment of the primary color lightness to achieve the desired whitepoint. Of the three gain controls only two should be used for the adjustment because a third component is redundant and just decreases the white level more than necessary. The 6-axis color control shouldn't be touched at all – the only result will be a nonlinear display state.

However: The sRGB mode of the U2711 is reasonably precise – taking into consideration that we are not speaking of a display with flexible color space emulation.

kevinsbane said:

When you say your colours are "bad"... are you referring to what you see by eye and your own impressions? Or are you actually comparing to a reference colour sheet, or are using a hardware calibrator?

If 100% red seems too orangey in sRGB... well, sRGB might have orangey reds.

Click to expand...

This is what i experience on my monitor at work when put into sRGB mode:

i think its an error with the monitor, because i have the same monitor at home, which doesnt have that problem

Regarding the orangey reds and teal green in sRGB i think its fair to expect that Red is Red and not orange... otherwise red lips and tulips will look wrong

Blkout said:

The "neon" colors can be adjusted in the custom mode. Makes a world of difference really but I'm sure you already knew about this.

Click to expand...

I see you are banned but I will reply anyways since you might read this, first of all I have no equipment to do such a thing. Second those controls serve as others have mentioned for adjusting the whitepoint and do nothing for color gamut.

I guess after browsing reviews I was wrong about the undercoverage (poor memory!) I'm wondering if the OP is used to looking at calibrated or close to accurate displays as we have been stuck with wide gamut for years now on most monitors

StaticSurge said:

I'm wondering if the OP is used to looking at calibrated or close to accurate displays as we have been stuck with wide gamut for years now on most monitors

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i'm not used to looking at a calibrated monitor so yes i don't know how it SHOULD look

i just know that red should be red instead of orange....

Montago said:

This is what i experience on my monitor at work when put into sRGB mode:
i think its an error with the monitor, because i have the same monitor at home, which doesnt have that problem

Regarding the orangey reds and teal green in sRGB i think its fair to expect that Red is Red and not orange... otherwise red lips and tulips will look wrong

Click to expand...

Have you compared them side by side?

I wouldn't say U2711s sRGB emulation to be accurate because blue is slightly neon, red is too much red (it actually should be slightly orangeish). Green is on the other hand is way too undersaturated.

Overall picture seems ok but this is not exactly how it should look like...

calibration won't fix this, at least not in most software. What calibration does is calibrating gamma ramp via 2D LUT. For full gamut remaping 3D LUT is necessary and only some programs do that.

conclusion: monitors like U2711 cannot be fully calibrated and definitely in a way most people assume calibration works. Some software will make use of information about gamut in ICC profile but most won't and it will be at least troublesome to switch back and forth monitor modes (and ofcourse match gamma ramp to given mode...).

and remember: calibration in this case will introduce banding!
so just don't have too high hopes for calibrator ...

ps. only professional monitors with hardware calibration can be truly calibrated

I wouldn't say U2711s sRGB emulation to be accurate because blue is slightly neon, red is too much red (it actually should be slightly orangeish). Green is on the other hand is way too undersaturated.

Click to expand...

At least our test samples (U2711/ U3011) were precise enough (example) for every day usage – although a flexible color space emulation is of course a different kettle of fish. Recent implementations are even non static and based on an actual display characterization and user defined source color spaces. The transformations are then precalculated by a CMM and written into the LUT.