Monitor question

As a man with an early case of "oldtimers", all the numbers are just mumbo-jumbo to me.
Many of you seem know what you are talking about but a "chosen few" do not accept pm's from just anybody. So here I post.

I may be buying this HP monitor next week at a very, very good price. I would appreciate your opinions!

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/30inch-display-pissing-match-hp-lp3065-vs-dell-and-apple-199147.php

Thank you!

A couple things...
1. That monitor has a native resolution of 2560 x 1600... better make sure your computer has enough horsepower to actually USE that resolution. If your video card isn't powerful enough to run it near 2560 x 1600 its going to look like crap when you have to reduce your screen size a bunch (blocky images and fuzzy text).

2. The lamp in it isn't very bright. I would only consider it if I was going to use it in a darker room, or at least one where you dont get a lot of sunlight.

3. Depends on HOW good of a price... If the above 2 points are questionable, I would start to consider just buying a smaller monitor.

30" may be a bit too big for computing uses. The 27" inch Wide screen., Dell is the best deal of all and perfect size IMO, but as said before, you need a powerful system and the best video card to get the most of it.

If the OP has a decent video card that can take advantage of that 2560x1600 screen, he should go for it. I wouldn't even consider a LCD monitor with a response rate greater than 8ms for gaming. I waited a LONG time before I got my first LCD. Older LCD screens handle fast moving things poorly.

I first bought the Dell 30" but found it too big, especially for games, unless sitting further away from the screen, so i returned it and got the 27" and love it.

im using an Apple 30 inch and a pioneer 50 inch...thirty is not to big

I'm not sure there's any such thing as a monitor that is "too big", unless your desk/wall space is limited or unless your computer doesn't have enough graphics horsepower to handle a lot of pixels. All things being equal, as far as I'm concerned, the bigger the better. You'd be surprised how fast "big" becomes "small" as soon as you start using all that new space.

When I upgraded from dual 19" standard panels to dual 24" widescreen panels, I felt like I was staring at the Grand Canyon for the first couple of days. The view was so huge and panaoramic. By the end of the week though, I'd found a place to park each window and on-screen doohickey, and I've been wishing for one or two additional screens ever since. But I'm sure if I had those, I'd get used to their presence so fast I'd still find cause for complaint. Screen realestate is like sex or pizza. No matter how much you have today, you always want more tomorrow.

So I'll never accept these "30 inches is too big" sentiments. That may be true for some, but it's certainly not true for me.

That said, I have yet to see a 30" monitor with good specs on it. For whatever reason, compared with their smaller counterparts, they all tend to suffer from any or all of the following conditions: dimness, slow response times, low contrast, poor viewing angle. And that's before you even get into things like color inconsistencies and light bleed, which you have to watch out for with just about any flat panel.

As 30" screens go, this HP looks better than most on paper. It seems kind of dim at 300 cd/m^2, but considering Eizo's new 30" Flexscan is only 260, it's not unusually low. 8 ms response time is also pretty good for a 30", but Eizo beats it by about 25% at 6 ms. 1000:1 sounds like a decent contrast ratio. However, "sounds like" and "looks like" can be two different things, as I learned the hard way not too long ago. Samsung claims 3000:1 contrast on many of their current flat panels, which sounds great, but when you actually use those monitors, they look really terrible, and it's obvious those numbers came out of some hypothetical formula in a lab, not from any actual observational measurements.

Bottom line, without seeing the thing first hand, it's hard to say anything for sure. It's easy to make technical claims on paper, but quite another actually to deliver. I'd say if you're just dying to have a 30", the HP is probably worth a try. Just make sure that wherever you get it from has a good return policy in case you don't like it.

For what it's worth, I certainly wouldn't go for the Apple with it's garbage 700:1 contrast ratio, and painfully slow 14 ms response. I find it half laughable, half disgusting, that Apple, who tries so hard to market itself as "for artists", would sell monitors with those specs at all, let alone charge as much as they do for them with a straight face, but I digress.

If you're on a budget, the Dell is a maybe since it's so cheap, but you get what you pay for with their screens. Every Dell panel I've ever seen, while OK in many respects, has had an unbelievably high white point, which casts a bluish tint over everything. Never use Dell screens for photography or serious artwork.

If quality is of greater concern to you than size, I would suggest dropping a step or two smaller, and spending the same amount of money on an Eizo S2411W 24". I've got two of them, and I absolutely love them. Incredibly realistic color, 3000:1 contrast (for real, not like Samsung), 2 ms response, 450 cd/m^2 brightness, user controllable white point (4,000 K – 10,000 K). I actually have to be careful in my SL work with these things since other people can't always see what I can see. I had two different people (both using Dells with that hideously high white point) tell me that a yellow wall texture of mine looked green to them, not yellow at all. I had to make a note not to use that particular shade ever again, or people with Dell screens won't be able to see it. Also, I often have people tell me they just can't see much, if any, of the subtle shading I put into some predominantly white or light-colored textures. It's kind of saddening to spend so much time delicately blending shadows, only to have half the audience not be able to see the results, but oh well. There's nothing to be done about it.

My only complaint about the S2411W is that there's a small amount of light bleed around the edges of the screen. That's really getting nitpicky though, since you can only see it when the screen is totally black, and when the room is dark. During normal use, it's not visible at all.


I hope this has been helpful for you. As always, don't just take my word for it. Do your own research and draw your own conclusions. I'm happy to offer an opinion when I can though.





Oh, and just to clarify, it's not that I'm "not accepting PM's from just anybody". It's that I CAN'T receive PM's from anyone at all. I can't even access my own PM box. When I try, it tells me I "do not have permission to access this page". I also can't view attachments (usually) unless I log in with an alt. I can view them with this account maybe 10% of the time. Size of the attached file seems to have no bearing. It's really weird. Clearly, something in my account settings is screwed up, but the Lindens have been unable to figure out what it is. It's annoying.

Thank you for all the replies.

I was looking for bigger than my 19" monitor, but not for something as big as 30", until I found this one.

I have a Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz with 2 gb of ram and a NVidia GeForce 6600 graphics card. SL seems to run very well with this setup. Is this enough to run the Lp3065?

My computer is in a room that doesn't get much direct sunlight, and I have plenty of room for a large monitor.
My interpretation of the specs say that there are things that could be better, but for a 30" it's better than most. If it doesn't work out, I'll try to resell it. I'm buying it cheap enough.


Quote of the day:

Screen realestate is like sex or pizza. No matter how much you have today, you always want more tomorrow... Chosen Few

All that Display space, is nice eyecandy and might be nice for SL, since SL is not exactly a fast paced game, but in fast paced games having too much screen space requires too much head turning, side to side eye movement, bigger mouse-hand movements and feels like sitting to close in a movie theater, which slows response time. I love large, widescreens but personally I found it got counter-productive past 27" inches. 27" is still huge and immersive when sitting at a desk and a thousand dollars cheaper.

For passive watching from a couch, with a longer viewing distance, then sure, the bigger the better.

I must disagree. I feel that with games, larger screens give a more immersive feel. I've never owned a 30" monitor, but I have played enough games on projectors to believe I can speak from experience. There's nothing like blasting your buddies when they're standing in front of you, 6 feet tall.

Granted, the wall or projector screen is further from your head than a monitor would be, but since it's so much larger, it's gotta even out. (Of course, the pixel resolution of projectors sucks, but that's a different topic. It's still fun to play wall-size, even if the visual quality isn't that great.) I'd be hard pressed to believe that the eye movements required when sitting 5 feet from a 10-foot screen are any different than when sitting 15 inches from a 30" screen.

As for the bigger mouse movements, investing in a good hires/high-speed gaming mouse can take care of that. Crank that sucker up to 2000 dpi or so, and a little bit of hand movement translates to a lot of distance on screen.

You're of course welcome to your own opinion, but if I had to guess, I'd be willing to bet that your disdain for the 30" screens has had more to do with the fact that 30-inchers tend to have such worse specs than 27" or 24" panels do. You said both your 30" and your 27" monitors have been Dells right? Dell's two monitors in those sizes both have pretty lousy response times, but when you consider that the 30" is twice as slow as the 27", it's not hard to see why it wouldn't be well suited for gaming. At 12 ms, it was probably ghost city. Also, the 27" is 33% brighter, which can make a huge difference as well. Between the ghosting and the relative dimness on the bigger screen, there was probably enough eye strain involved to give you all kinds of unpleasant feelings when trying to game with that thing. Just a theory though; I could certainly be wrong.

Also, not that it's a particularly important detail, but just to be accurate, if Dell is what we're talking about, then the price difference between the two is only $200, not $1000. If you got a $1000 refund when you exchanged yours, you did pretty well.

I'm a tad long-sighted. I therefore use reading glasses on a small monitor close to me. I studied long and hard, televisions in showrooms sometimes sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of them much to the staff's amusement on occasions. I carefully worked out how far away I could get various sized screens on my desk and comfortably focus on the screen. I ended up with an end-of-range LG 32" wide screen. I can now read the IM and chat in SL and the landscape proportions does wonders for the scenery. I've not tried other games though I'd imagine my Flight Simulator should be pretty awesome. My only criticism is that at this ratio and I'm talking XP here, not Vista, text in other applications have an odd sizing problem where two incidents of the same letter in the same line might have different width uprights due to rescaling.

I bought it for SL though and for that, it's wonderful. I sit about 75cm from the screen.

Sorry to bring back an old post, but I thought that I would give you an update.

I love my new 30" monitor! Besides all the the extra desk space I have now, Windlight looks even better than ever. And dvd's are amazing!

I did have to upgrade my GeForce6600 up to a 7600gs to be able to run at the max resolution. The 7600gs was the best that I could put in my old (agp) system. All the best cards seem to be using Pci Express. I find that running at 1680x1050 works best for all the different things I use the computer for.

With my Pentium 3.2 with only ONE gig of ram, I am able to run Windlight using a draw distance of 300 and except for sky detail, which I have at mid level, everything else maxed out. The only lag I have is SL induced.
Oh, and for this brand new registered (ie. not stolen) and warranteed monitor, I only had to pay $450. Yeah, I'm happy.