Dell U2711

Probably won't take longer than a week for someone to figure out if the AG bothers them or not. I came from NEC 20wmgx2 (opticlear/glossy) and I knew after a few days it was never going to work....most things were fine but reading small small to medium text on a white background was just too troublesome. I was constantly rubbing my eyes because it just looked blurry. I generally don't like Apple products but I'm just thankful SOMEONE has brought a high res glossy IPS to the market. Damn if I don't miss the 16:10 though. :(
 
Screenshot or link to such text on the internet is what I want so I can test this out on MY u2711 to see if it is present or noticeable to me. I've only had mine a few days. So far I have not encountered anything unpleasant, though I do notice the AG somewhat.

shurcooL said:
You mean photo. A screenshot won't show anything.
Click to expand...
 
That gets a bit sticky. My best examples are work stuff and I can't really "show" that. Grr. Sadly I'm saying and doing the right thing, but it won't make my case very well.

I'm trying to recreate something but it's pretty limited what I have on this machine for drawing tools. Let me see what I can do. To describe it essentially take a light background

I'll do roughly the color here in text

Then place a very light grey text on top of that.

It is in effect a windows menu bar with a light grey name on it. As you can guess the name is important. I have a 2407 at work for which this has so much never been a problem, that I didn't even know it was a problem till I brought some work home and couldn't read the windows I was in, literally. I solved it by enlarging the windows, and putting them on top of each other which helped. But that slowed down the work because I could no longer have the windows side by side. Now before you read into this that I simply can't read small text, I make very, very small text spreadsheets all the time. The rest of the world wonders how I can read them. Anyway, I found that on some websites (which under the pressure of answering the question I can't recall just at the moment) that used very pale grey and pale green shades and the twinkle from the coating made them nearly unreadable (those fonts mind you not the whole page). I have 2 laptop screens, one of them a good M6400, a 2407 at work, 2405 at home and an older 219T (if anyone remembers that) to compare all this to. None of them had any problems, and in fact when putting 2 of these screens alongside the 2711, others in the house were prompted to say "eww what's wrong with that" (pointing to the 2711).

So while I'm not easily able to "show" you. If you have the monitor you can either recreate the shades I'm speaking of or visit a few sites with a mix of shaded char's and you might not like what you see. I certainly don't.

Does that help somewhat?


PS: I've been messing around tonight trying to fix my Truetype and I've gotten some improvement, but it's 'acceptable' and not great. I'm hoping for better, but I've got Dig Vibrance turned up to enhance contrast and Truetype made about as well as possible which is ruining the rest of the image just to get a few things to show up that I happen to need. But it's a tiny bit better. Perhaps I can tweak a bit more out of it. This whole bit isn't new to me, but I've never had to tweak my screens so badly. Perhaps that is the way of things.
 
Ok now that I see those colors, the green is a bit darker than what I was looking for and the grey is about right, maybe a tiny bit lighter, but not much.
 
Ok one site that was giving me trouble is better now but maybe you folks will see some of the same stuff.

http://www.ubergizmo.com/

At the top right of the page is the work language. I can read it now, but the sparkle effect makes the letters very indistinct. Many of the small grey char text below the var articles was having the same impact, but the tweaks I have now have gotten that somewhat improved. As I said above, tweaking has gotten this closer to acceptable. Yet if it weren't for my stubborn streak I'd sell this thing and just head upstairs to the old, but trusty, 2405 and work there.
 
Ok many things and it's far too late to be up - too little sleep and too much to do.

I was making a whole series of changes, many of which helped.
Turned down the vibrance.
Two reasons. 1 It was blowing out the colors which was making the problem worse 2 The rest of the image looked awful in trying to fix a few things. This was part of the right answer (applied gently) but should not have been used so heavily.

Used the Windows XP cleartype tweaking tool. This helped significantly. Funny thing was I could drag it to the other monitor and it had no effect (all things were clear before the tweaking on the 2405 and laptop screen, M6400, when they weren't on the 2711) but when I went through and tweaked it, the other monitors stayed as is or were a tiny bit better, but the 2711 shaped up much better. This was almost "good" but not quite there.

Then something funny happened. I had to rearrange things. So I needed my longer Displayport cable to reach. Turns out this made a sizeable change in quality, and I have no idea why. It's not like it was some super cable. It does have gold ends where the one I was using does not, but seriously, in the digital format, nothing should have changed. But bam, 2711 sharpened up to near perfection. The whites are still as many describe "somewhat sparkly" but the entire screen is dramatically improved. This also necessitated a shutdown and reboot, so maybe something there. Too tired to rearrange and try old cable again and reboot to see at this point. Oh and the "better" cable is longer, 10' vs 6' so it should be "worse" and it was a cheapie cable. Lord knows.

Anyway. Get a good cable. Displayport image seems a tiny bit better than DVI, but only tiny bit. But good cable made things noticeably better. Use the XP or Win 7 Cleartype tuner to do its job. It helps. Monitor sharpness to 50 seems good. Contrast to 70 helped (monitor). And a mild amount 10-15 pts of Digital Vibrance (to taste, this isn't dramatically necessary, just helps a bit on some of the milder shades).

Hope this helps anyone in the same boat I was in.

And a nice looking picture to show off some of the colors on these monitors!
http://www.coolfreewallpaper.net/cool_free_wallpaper_Notre_Dame_Montreal_ca.htm (safe)
 
I will try hooking mine up with DVI this evening. I have only connected with the supplied displayport cable. It does seem odd that displayport vs DVI would make a difference. But the quality of the cable, as you suggest, may be the issue.
 
Sounds like the cable may have been the issue....

I'm actually more annoyed by the AG on my 24" dell at work than the coating on my U2711.
 
been using my u2711 for about 2 weeks now. its my first real "big" monitor (high res) and also my first ips display aswell. nothing bad to say about it, i dont notice this AG coating everyone keeps bringing up, maybe i dont know what i am looking for?

none the less, great monitor and really puts my cards to work :D
 
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Does anyone know how to calculate what are the monitor pixels per inch of this monitor when the resolution is set to 2560 x 1440?
Thanks
 
Startup123 said:
Does anyone know how to calculate what are the monitor pixels per inch of this monitor when the resolution is set to 2560 x 1440?
Thanks
Click to expand...

Should be 108.79.

Formula if you're interested: The square root of 2560 squared + 1440 squared divided by 27 (monitor size).
 
I'm returning my u2711. One side is tinted the blue (and the other side might be slightly tinted red).

I've also noticed one other massive issue for all you graphic designers out there:
Throw up a solid black bar on a white background. Now move that bar to the far right/left of the screen and focus on the edge without moving your head. I see a yellow/red or blue/cyan line going down the bar.

I bought a 2408 and that had problems, now this u2711 has problems. I'm never going to buy a dell monitor ever again.

Now I'm going to spend an hour talking to dell now getting this thing returned.
 
markd said:
I've also noticed one other massive issue for all you graphic designers out there:
Throw up a solid black bar on a white background. Now move that bar to the far right/left of the screen and focus on the edge without moving your head. I see a yellow/red or blue/cyan line going down the bar.
Click to expand...

:rolleyes:

You just described chromatic aberration from eye glasses.
 
hey guys. so im pretty close to pulling the trigger on this monitor. ive done a good amount of research, and i am sure this is the best monitor for me in all aspects, so its now just a matter of setting it up.

my first question is: what are my wall mount options. my desk is kind of weird, so i would prefer to wall mount it directly over my 20" 2007WFP monitor. but could i set it up in windows 7 to have dual monitors right above and below each other? also, where can i read up on calibrating this monitor perfectly. im no expert, but i would like to utilize all of the monitors aspects
 
I've not had any, not even a hint of color tinting, though I have not used it tons of hours, maybe 100-200 in 6 months. But that has not gone wrong at all on mine.

Monitor arm (not wall mounted but surface mounted) that I use is the Ergotron MX arm. I like it, but I'm not going to say it's the best or worst. Just one that works in your list of ideas.
 
I have my U2711 for a few weeks and I'm willing to buy another one.

Mine has no problem at all and only thing I can complay is 1440 instead of 1600 lines. But also, there's no sign of a new model in the near future or price drop.

It's interesting that when my U2711 shipped I got depressed because of so much space and I couldn't use it, it was rly very strange, and now I want more space.

Apple's monitor is available here, but it's like 60% more expensive and has only DisplayPort, I'd need to buy an adapter too.

I used to play SC2 on this monitor, until those fukers from blizzard banned me, and graph was rly great.

It's hard to spend so much in a monitor but it's rly worth it. In 3 years I hope we have a 30" or even a 32" H-IPS, then I'm gonna buy it and have 4 or 3 monitors!
 
Also, I've played games on CRT, 2007WFP and U2711, and never felt any discomfort due to input lag. I feel everything happening on the same time my brain is ordering my hands to command them.

Hey, does anybody know a software that controls color management and uses profiles? I'd like to make many color profiles for all kind of needs and switch them very easily, but never found anything that would do that. Old nVidia CP used to have something like that, but forceware took it down.
 
How is this monitor for gaming? I'd like to play FPS and RTS games (not competitively, but I'd consider myself pretty damn sensitive to input lag), would this monitor be the one for me?

I also want it for work and hooking up my macbook to from time to time. Possibly my ps3..
 
This just went on sale on Dell.ca for a little over 30% off (849 from 1249 CAD). I read a bunch of the earlier posts on this monitor and people were getting it for ~$650USD months ago... Is $849 CAD even a good deal? Relative to $1249 it's great, sure - but would anyone still spend that much on it, or would they buy some other, newer monitor?
 
audirs said:
price is a main factor for me, but if there was a 30" for this price id obviously opt for that. the res wont be too off from a 30", there is only 160 pixel difference between this dell @ 2560x1440 and your standard 30" @ 2560x1600. i cant justify the price difference, for 160 pixels...
Click to expand...

It's not just 160 pixels, it's 160 lines x 2560, = 409600, a 800x600 display has 480000...

Also, a 30" monitor has bigger pixels, that's great for folk complaining of size of text.

Regarding the AG coating, I have my 2007WFP on my side and before them I used CRT monitors, and these 2 monitors have the best image I've ever seen! If there's something better I didn't see it yet.
 
I just saw this monitor first hand at a local Dell store.

All I can say is: disappointing.

IMHO, when I am paying $1000 for a monitor I expect a glossy panel. Anyone doing any sort of professional work on a monitor like this is going to be working in a light-controlled environment so the "oh my God teh glare is horribel!" argument really don't hold any water. This monitor looks downright cheap compared to the Apple 27" Cinema display. That said, Apple's lack of DVI-D support makes it an absolute non-starter for me.

I went to the Dell store ready to spend my $1100 but it's just really hard for me to get over the way colors look so washed-out. The lack of monitors with resolution greater than 1920x1080 is simply shocking considering that there is a big market for them.
 
Whoisthisreally said:
It is a fairly petty complaint. Most people at home would prefer to take a softer coating, like on some PVA panels, but there are more important things to concern yourself about, like actual performance.
Click to expand...

What a load of toss...

Please come to my office and tell my art director that he's an idiot for not buying AG-coated monitors for his designers and coders.

AG coating is something I'd expect on a monitor being used in a place with lots of direct sunlight or your basic cubicle farm office. It does NOT belong on any IPS monitor.
 
DefBringer said:
I just saw this monitor first hand at a local Dell store.

All I can say is: disappointing.

IMHO, when I am paying $1000 for a monitor I expect a glossy panel. Anyone doing any sort of professional work on a monitor like this is going to be working in a light-controlled environment so the "oh my God teh glare is horribel!" argument really don't hold any water. This monitor looks downright cheap compared to the Apple 27" Cinema display. That said, Apple's lack of DVI-D support makes it an absolute non-starter for me.

I went to the Dell store ready to spend my $1100 but it's just really hard for me to get over the way colors look so washed-out. The lack of monitors with resolution greater than 1920x1080 is simply shocking considering that there is a big market for them.
Click to expand...

Local Dell stores exist? I'd love to see some of these Dell monitors in person. Where is this Dell store?
 
I do web development and I spend some time coding in Notepad++ and Dreamweaver, white background with a lot of black text, and I see no problem at all, be it DPI or AG coating.

It's very strange ppl be so annoyed by it at the point of returning.

Colors are very hard to calibrate, it's damn hard to have a good balance for web, dev, bright and colorful game and dark movie, I may not have the best colors all the time and not be noticing it, but I'd never describe anything I see as blurry...
 
I'm trying to get a handle on what the AG coating on this monitor looks like. My two points of reference are my 24" 2007 iMac (that is obviously glossy), and my work monitors which are a pair of Dell 2007FP monitors. These obviously have some kind of coating I think, or maybe they're just matte.

Has anyone seen both a 2007fp and a u2711 and can tell me whether the coatings and look are similar. If so I don't find it objectionable on the 2007fp, so doubt I would have issues with it on the u2711.
 
teiresias said:
I'm trying to get a handle on what the AG coating on this monitor looks like. My two points of reference are my 24" 2007 iMac (that is obviously glossy), and my work monitors which are a pair of Dell 2007FP monitors. These obviously have some kind of coating I think, or maybe they're just matte.

Has anyone seen both a 2007fp and a u2711 and can tell me whether the coatings and look are similar. If so I don't find it objectionable on the 2007fp, so doubt I would have issues with it on the u2711.
Click to expand...

Check the Serial number on the back of your 2007fp. If it ends in "L", it is an LG IPS screen and should have the same coating as the u2711. If it ends in "S" it is a Samsung PVA screen and will have a milder AG coating than the u2711.
 
Ends in 'S', so it's PVA and milder. Still, I don't find what's on here at the moment distracting at all, so I suppose it depends on how much more aggressive the 2711 is, I may just have to take the plungs, since at 27" with a higher than 1200 or 1080p resolution there isn't really a huge amount of choices on the market (so far as I can tell).
 
teiresias said:
Ends in 'S', so it's PVA and milder. Still, I don't find what's on here at the moment distracting at all, so I suppose it depends on how much more aggressive the 2711 is, I may just have to take the plungs, since at 27" with a higher than 1200 or 1080p resolution there isn't really a huge amount of choices on the market (so far as I can tell).
Click to expand...

From what I gather, the HP 30" ZR30W uses a less aggressive AG coating than the U2711. I cannot say this firsthand, but it seems to be the case as posts on this forum don't complain about the AG coating on the ZR30W. This HP monitor is roughly the same price as the U2711 and has very favorable reviews.

I can say without question that out of all the dozens (hundreds?) of monitors I have seen in my life, I have never seen one with such an obnoxious AG coating as on the Dell. It literally has the appearance of someone taking some very fine cheesecloth and stretching it across the monitor. No other Dell monitor in my experience has a coating this bad.

Please read this thread from someone who compared U2711, Apple 27", and the HP ZR30W. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=991927
 
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DefBringer said:
From what I gather, the HP 30" ZR30W uses a less aggressive AG coating than the U2711. I cannot say this firsthand, but it seems to be the case as posts on this forum don't complain about the AG coating on the ZR30W. This HP monitor is roughly the same price as the U2711 and has very favorable reviews.

I can say without question that out of all the dozens (hundreds?) of monitors I have seen in my life, I have never seen one with such an obnoxious AG coating as on the Dell. It literally has the appearance of someone taking some very fine cheesecloth and stretching it across the monitor. No other Dell monitor in my experience has a coating this bad.

Please read this thread from someone who compared U2711, Apple 27", and the HP ZR30W. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=991927
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. I love reading comparisons like this - very interesting. I wonder if the ZR24w and ZR30w have the same AG coatings. Have you ever seen the 30" cinema display in person? I thought the AG coating on that was horrendous. I can't imagine the U2711 being even worse than that. If so, then holy crap.
 
addictedto60fps said:
Thanks for the link. I love reading comparisons like this - very interesting. I wonder if the ZR24w and ZR30w have the same AG coatings. Have you ever seen the 30" cinema display in person? I thought the AG coating on that was horrendous. I can't imagine the U2711 being even worse than that. If so, then holy crap.
Click to expand...

Actually, you bring up a good point about the 30" cinema display. I saw one of these this past weekend and I totally agree, it has very bad AG coating. I would say that the U2711's coating is just as bad if not worse. Part of the problem is the very small pixel density of the U2711 vs. the pixel density in the 30"....the AG is less annoying on the Apple 30" as a result. (please keep in mind, this is just my opinion).
 
After evaluating my work area and what I really need I think I'm going to stick with a 24" monitor, for a few reasons. I prefer 16:10 when doing document work, I think all the 27" monitors (the good ones anyway) are all 16:9, I'd have to jump up to a 30" monitor to get 16:10 again.

I think I'm going to go with the ZR24W, for the reasons I mentioned above, and the non-wide gamut of the monitor, since one of my primary uses is photography editing and I shoot and print in the sRGB colorspace pretty exclusively (I'm not a pro, so I don't really delve into AdobeRGB, etc.).
 
DefBringer said:
From what I gather, the HP 30" ZR30W uses a less aggressive AG coating than the U2711.
Click to expand...

That is unlikely in the extreme. Recent LG IPS panels share the same coating is almost a certainty.

Who complains about it depends on who buys it. There have been a great deal of complaints about Dell 30" that has the same LG LCD panel.

I think it is as simple as Dell has more sales, so they get more complaints. I also think Dell gets more people willing to give it a try since they have a very good return policy.

You also get a follow-on effect as people start to associate strong AG with Dell (from reading these forums) and the first thing they do with a new Dell is look for AG then complain that they have it too.
 
DefBringer said:
You may say it is unlikely but that however is exactly the conclusion made by this person who bought both monitors in question and compared them (along with the Apple 27").

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=991927
Click to expand...

And I still think it unlikely. He is comparing it to the memory of a monitor he no longer has.

Just change the brightness of your screen or put a different colored background up and the appearance of your AG will change. Also the dot pitch it tighter on the U2711, which may make it more annoying when reading small text. It is extremely subjective.
 
whats the best cheap GPU i can buy so i can display the max resolution for this monitor and not have any problems?
 
Shayes said:
whats the best cheap GPU i can buy so i can display the max resolution for this monitor and not have any problems?
Click to expand...

Im using my U2711 with my macbook pro 13" which have the 9400M and i don't have any problems, and its a crappy GPU. I suppose i don't need to say anything more. :)
 
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