NEC MultiSync PA271W (27" IPS)
NEC's MultiSync PA271W is the most expensive 27" LCD in our roundup. The price premium you're expected to pay reflects this monitor's professional market segment, which values a screen's ability to accurately produce color.
Of course, if you want more vertical workspace, the PA271W has a handy feature that lets you rotate the screen. It's becoming increasingly difficult to find 4:3 monitors, which is unfortunate for folks looking at lots of text. The natural solution is to buy a larger widescreen display to compensate for the loss of vertical resolution. The ability to work with this screen using a 9:16 ratio is an even better solution, though.
Display connectivity is straightforward: you get two DVI-D connectors and one DisplayPort input. NEC also provides two USB upstream connectors that function as a KVM switch, in case you want to work between two systems.
The OSD options are extensive, and we could easily spend a number of pages discussing this model's flexibility. The company dedicated a lot of effort to exposing the knobs and dials typically hidden in most mainstream display devices. You can read more about the scope of NEC's settings in the owner's manual, but you can expect to see the complete gamut of color options: temperature, brightness (40-400 cd/m2), gamma, whiteness uniformity, and so on. If you don't want to bother with monitor calibration, the pre-defined settings provided by NEC are very close to being correct. You really need a spectrophotometer or colorimeter, though, if you want to take things a step further.
