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OSD Setup And Calibration
The OSD is quite extensive and offers everything needed by casual and power users alike. Touching any key brings up a small quick menu that floats just above the controls. Pressing the third key opens the full OSD.
OSD Tour
The U3415W is so accurate in its default state that all you really need to do is adjust brightness to taste. Contrast should be left at its factory setting of 75 for best results.
Here is the input selector. The HDMI selection above MHL is version 2.0-compatible.
Input color format can be set to RGB for computer signals or YPbPr for digital component content, as you would find from many Blu-ray players and cable boxes.
Only two gamma presets are provided – PC (2.2) and Mac (2.0).
There are six preset picture modes. Standard is the factory setting and we found we could not improve upon it in either the Color Temp or Custom Color modes. When you select Color Temp, a slider pops up that lets you adjust the white point by Kelvin values.
The color temp slider is a bit coarse, but if you want a specific setting (and it’s on the list) these numbers are accurate according to our measurements.
When you choose the Custom Color mode, the menu changes to options for white balance gain and offset; plus six-color hue and saturation. It’s great that Dell offers this many adjustments, but we couldn’t match the amazing accuracy of the Standard mode (which cannot be customized).
Here are the rest of the image options. The aspect ratio can be 21:9, 16:9 (black bars will appear on the sides), Auto Resize or 1:1 (where images below 3440x1440 will be shown windowed). The Sharpness control is just fine on the factory setting of 50. Response time (overdrive) works well on the Fast setting. We didn’t see any additional ghosting but screen draw time does decrease by three milliseconds.
Enabling DP 1.2 allows the use of the MST feature. Along with the provided DP output, you can connect two screens to a single video card output.
Uniformity compensation is something we see on a lot of professional monitors. It often reduces contrast, and our measurements of the U3415W support that - we’ll show you that result along with its effects on uniformity on pages four and seven.
An ultra-wide monitor is perfect for displaying two sources at once. You can also view them in a PIP configuration if you wish. Since one of the HDMI inputs supports MHL, the U3415W can mirror the output from a compatible smartphone or tablet.
This is where you assign the USB upstream ports to a video input — so you can connect two computers to a single monitor, keyboard and mouse.
The speakers sound better than most given their nine-watt output. Here is where you adjust their volume and specify the audio source as either the main or sub-window in a PIP configuration.
The power LED and USB ports can be turned off during standby to save power. However, leaving the USB hub active means that you can charge devices even when the U3415W is powered down.
The OSD is available in eight languages and can be set to five different transparency levels. You can extend the timeout to 60 seconds or lock it out completely from user intervention.
The first two touch-keys can be programmed for different monitor functions such as brightness, input source, picture mode and more.
The final menu lets you toggle the button sound which beeps at every key press and control DDC/CI (leave it on for two-way communications between monitor and computer). Enabling LCD Conditioning runs a series of screen wipes designed to combat image retention.
Factory Reset returns all OSD options to their default settings.
Calibration
Normally with factory-calibrated monitors we’ll adjust the custom mode to see if we can improve on the default adjustments. The U3415W is one of the rare screens where that’s pretty much impossible. The Standard mode posted some of the best numbers we’ve ever recorded for both out-of-box and calibrated grayscale and color gamut. Only the gamma showed room for improvement, but with just two presets available, we couldn’t address it. Since our calibration returned poorer results than the default modes, there’s little point in suggesting settings. We recommend for all uses that you turn off the uniformity compensation. It raises the black level, reduces contrast and doesn’t provide enough benefit in our opinion. Here are the brightness settings for the most commonly-used output levels.
- 50cd/m2 = 9
- 80cd/m2 = 17
- 120cd/m2 = 27
- 200cd/m2 = 50
