ZylonBane on 8/8/2010 at 18:13
As per the thread I linked above, apparently the U2311H has an issue with yellow/blue image tint.
Ulukai on 9/8/2010 at 13:15
I also have a 2209WA, and can vouch for its excellence as my primary PC screen.
If you're going to be watching movies though, personally, I'd want something a bit bigger which would tempt me to go with the newer model - especially if you're sitting on a sofa in your living room and not perched right in front of it on a desk.
Muzman on 15/8/2010 at 08:42
Well the tax return came in rather healthy so I ordered a U2711. I'll let y'all know how it goes.
Chimpy Chompy on 15/8/2010 at 17:35
Well i got the U2311H and am liking it so far. All I've played on it so far are Warcraft and GTAIV but it looks fine, straight of the box, on both. No tinting issues that i can see. I've put a DVD on and wandered around the room and the picture stays quite uniform. Not tried Thief or anything requiring lots of black yet.
Also yes i wish I could justify sinking £680+tax on a monitor!
Muzman on 15/8/2010 at 22:11
Yeah, it seems like a ton given how cheap a lot of pretty decent monitors are these days (well, it is a ton). But I paid only a little less for a 'pro-sumer' level 19" CRT about 8 years ago. Everything I read tells me, if I want to match that colour I have to go IPS. Plus I like the idea of bigger than HD res and the wider gamut (even though that'll be a bit of an adventure). Hopefully it'll last as long.
It's not much bigger than a U2410 but people are always warning you off those for various reasons. And it's funny if you read those Hard OCP forums and so on. Those guys are hard core and can find anything to bitch about ("It's too small for the res! get the 30", or two of!" - the 30" is exactly twice the price, so no. "It's not as good as the comparable NECs! It sucks!" -the comparable (and often, the smaller) NECs cost 2 1/2 - 3 times as much, so no). After shopping around for a while this 27 is kinda the happy medium in a lot of respects.
Muzman on 2/9/2010 at 14:56
U2711 short review time. Sorta anyway. I really don't know what to tell people about it. It arrived really fast. I've had it for about a week and half now. It's certainly huge, by my standards anyway. It makes my 19" look so pathetically small (despite its enormous weight). Just to rub it in you hook the thing up and set it to native res and there's your old pathetic desktop and ap windows packed into the corner
This is my first LCD. I've used them fairly regularly before and didn't like them very much (Apple Cinema screens to boot, which must have been TN based at the time, considering the dithering I saw using them. My old work would probably have upgraded by now but this flogs what they had at the time). I've hated most TVs and montors and laptops I've been exposed to, even newer ones. This crushes them all at a stroke.
It's true that I wouldn't (and shouldn't) have bought it if anything less was expected, but I've been struggling along with the fading focus of my CRT being fairly happy after looking at all these other screens I'd seen. Even thought it's what I demanded, just how crisp the new screen is impresses me a lot so far.
Maybe that's the res talking. I'm extremely pleased I went for the higher res. While it was motivated slightly because the idea of merely having the same res screen as a TV standard seems, frankly, insulting, more screen realestate is currently working great for me. Most complaints I've read that the type gets too small or whatever have been unfounded. I haven't made any adjustments at all in Windows or Firefox. Everything is, if anything, easier to read (and it doesn't matter where on the screen it is for readabiity anymore, which is nice).
Colour is a bit hard to talk about. I haven't really beaten it up yet. I can report a lot of the things people say about wide gamuts don't seem to be present, or at least aren't as severe as in some cases. It's true that the colours can pop a bit. Mostly it's the reds I notice. If they're mapped to full saturation they can come out RED. But these situations where it over saturates everything, I haven't seen. Nor situations where you get these overbright colours sort of floating above everything else. I don't quite understand this stuff yet but I think if you're inside the sRGB gamut or less it's pretty much untouched. And if you are hitting full saturation it's being scaled quite smoothly and evenly. The milage of strict colour nerds is likely to vary somewhat. But I can't tell folks any more than this; these horror stories where the colours are being stretched all over the place and it's hard to keep them the same from one working space to the next I have not really seen at all. The monitor is basically fucking bright and must be adjusted carefully, but I have not encountered anything I think would be fundamentally unworkable without a fully ten bit system (which I don't have). Not yet anyway.
Games performance is interesting. I don't know what is expected of LCDs in dark games but I don't think what it's doing disputes what the reviews say about the black levels being great. You can see that it's displaying everything really nicely colour wise. It's just that you are competing with what I'm fairly sure is backlight leak around the edges being foggily spread all over the place by the glare difuser. This is frustrating in Thief and things like Stalker at night. I've had some success turning the brightness all the way down and the contrast all the way up. A generic setting eludes me. I don't know what it needs except maybe some lower than factory allowed brightness settings maybe. It seems pretty mediocre compared to CRTs in this regard, low brightness or contrast gaming, but I couldn't say how it compares to anything else similar. It reviews very well.
Stuff like Mirror's Edge is frankly astounding. Running it in native res does make my card want to cry however. (it's got a lot of supported resolutions and the internal scaler is pretty nice I reckon). Haven't seen any trailing or lag problems , but I'm less than hardcore about these things.
Really, for 99% of what I use it for it's really great. Feel free to quiz on anything I've missed.
Ostriig on 7/9/2010 at 19:59
Cool, thanks for the impressions Muz! I'm curious, have you tried the Dynamic Contrast feature? I remember when Bikerdude compared the Dell 2209WA to his NEC 20wgx2Pro, and while it racked up very well in general the Dell did noticeably fall short on this function.
Quote Posted by Bikerdude
Dynamic contrast operation:-
* Dell
- in dark areas it decreases the Brightness and increases the detail in the shadows - hmmm ok'ish.
- in light areas it increases the Contrast, making a bright light source even brighter - wtf, ouch my eyes.
* NEC
- in dark areas it increases the Contrast and increases the detail in the shadows - as your eyes would.
- in light area it decreases the Contrast, adjusting to a bright light source - as your eyes would.
Quite frankly, I'm not really crazy about the way the 2209WA's Dynamic Contrast works in dark areas, either, so I'm curious if they've made any improvements with the new series?
I'm also a little surprised that you're having trouble with Thief or Stalker. I think I know what you mean by edge light bleeding over and diffusing, but in my experience with my panel it's been so subtle that I really never noticed it unless I was actively looking for it. Especially compared to my previous cheapo TN Acer screen, no contest. Are you sure that it's the light bleed that's causing your discomfort, or is it possible that you're just noticing the difference between the CRT and LCD concepts of "black"?
While I'm at it, gotta vent - I've managed to put a sort of dent into mine in the meantime. Had the laptop set in front of the desktop's screen, was testing some compatibility for a project build between the two (with frustrating and unreasonable lack of success), so I get up and want to take that laptop back to the coffee table. Being already irritated, I yank the thing off the desk, and, go figure, the lid flips back and bangs the Dell. Call it a screen on screen collision if you will. Now I've got a slight gash in the lower half of the crystals matrix, about 1mm wide, 3 mm tall. Can't see it on a white screen, of course, barely on light colours, but on black images the backlight bleeds through in purple.
Motherfucker. :erg:
Aja on 7/9/2010 at 20:31
Muz, have you tried just increasing the ambient light? Turning on a desklamp and diffusing the light against a wall or something works wonders for nighttime LCD gaming, without hurting the atmosphere.
PS -- still super-happy with my cheap LED benQ panel. Bought a converter box to run the Wii through HDMI, and it scales wonderfully. I can't imagine a better performance to price ratio.
