We certainly enjoy having monitors this big on our desks. The vast screen real estate is a tremendous advantage to those who like to keep multiple windows open. With the extra height afforded by the 16:10 aspect ratio, you can have three documents side-by-side-by-side and still read text easily from three feet away. The high pixel density means you’ll never see any dot structure, even at two feet or less. And the wide gamut caters to the graphics pro who needs a monitor capable of displaying all of the Adobe RGB 1998 color space.

HP ZR30w
HP’s entry into the jumbo screen category offers a mix of qualities, most of which are good. On the pro side, it has superb build quality, plenty of brightness, excellent color accuracy, and a sleek functional look that will enhance any desk. It isn't perfect, though. We lament the lack of adjustability, and the relatively poor gamma performance. A few presets and a set of RGB sliders to adjust white balance would be welcome, and could even make the HP a stand-out product. Of course, it's possible to take care of those specific issues via software. We expect most graphics pros would have the ability to resolve them, then. Also, a selectable color gamut would be nice for those occasions when we’re watching a movie or TV show.

Double Sight DS-309W
The DS-309W is brand-new to the marketplace, replacing the now-discontinued DS-307W. Aside from a new bezel design, it appears to be the same screen in every other respect. It offers excellent accuracy after calibration, good build quality, and the same wide gamut as the HP. While its out-of-box performance is only fair, an instrumented calibration wrings out some excellent performance measurements. Though it doesn’t offer super-high contrast, we found its image to look every bit as good as the competition, mainly thanks to solid gamma performance. Like the HP, it offers the full Adobe RGB 1998 gamut, making it ideal for photographers and artists. Again, we would love to see a selectable gamut so one could properly enjoy a movie when not working. After all, with a screen this big, watching TV in the office takes on a whole new dimension!
There are really only two considerations here: do you want to spend around $1200 on a computer monitor, and do you need the larger color gamut? Other than that, there is no reason for us not to recommend either of these screens to those looking for largess. Based on its adjustability, we’d go for the DoubleSight, though plenty of folks (including us) would be just as happy with the HP. Either way, it’s hard to deny the allure of so much screen. And for those who demand a density above 100 pixels per inch and a tall 16:10 aspect ratio, they represent the top of the heap...for now.
- 30 Inches And 2560x1600: Two Big-Screen Monitors
- Measurement And Calibration Methodology: How We Test
- Results: Stock Brightness And Contrast
- Results: Calibrated Brightness And Contrast
- Results: Gamma And ANSI Contrast Ratio
- Results: Grayscale Tracking
- Results: Color Gamut And Performance
- Results: Viewing Angle And Uniformity
- Results: Pixel Response And Input Lag
- 30-Inch QHD, Is Bigger Better?
Isn't the ASUS PQ321 already out along with a few other 4K monitors? granted price is a whole other story
You seriously can't see the pixels? I can see them on a 27" 2560x1440, which has smaller pixels. The .25mm range is adequate to me, but really I'd prefer something smaller than the .233mm on the 2560x1440.
When considering something like this for games, don't forget the cost of the video card(s) needed to drive it. A HD7750 may be "sufferable" even up to 1920x1080, but I'm not sure even a HD7770 or GTX650Ti could play newer games on better than "low" settings on one of these.
I have a ZR30W myself, and I would NEVER trade it unless what I'm upgrading to has more than a 2560x1600 resolution.
I've played on all sorts of monitors, and resolution trumps all other specs, unless you're dealing with 30fps or something...
I really wish I would have spent 1200$ on it long ago. Battlefield 3 and other highly graphical games are comparable to nothing else in the world.
The 60hz is not "old tech", it's more than sufficient to run games smoothly if vertical sync is on (even still when it's off). 60 fps is fine, television (pre hd) was 28hz. Anything above 60fps you really don't notice too much.
Oh, and for those looking for 4k tv's to use (I'm way ahead of ya) they only have 30hz refresh rates over the HDMI 1.2 port. We're going to have to wait for the tv's to add another port, wait for the upgrade to HDMI 2.0, or wait for some other solution.
We aren't going to see many 16:10 in the future. the 4K stuff is going to be 16:9 unless someone makes the move to stick with 16:10. However, the difference when it comes to 16:9 with a 2560x1440 and 16:10 2560x1600 is very minimal unless you really really need that extra height!
A properly implemented OSD would blend overlay pixels on-the-fly and add less than 100ns of lag to the process, which would be undetectable. The Viewsonic VP2770 has an OSD and is on par with the fastest LCDs in this roundup for total input-output lag. Having an OSD does not equate to lag.
The art of zero-lag OSDs is very old: countless computer CRTs from the mid-90s have it and TVs have had it for even longer. The OSD locks timing with the H/V sync and substitutes its signal over the relevant areas on-the-fly. With LCDs, this is even easier to do since everything is digital.
What is more likely happening is that "laggy" LCDs are doing extra image processing/enhancement or power-saving tricks such as dynamic brightness adjustments. For dynamic backlighting (power saving trick), the LCD needs to know what the brightest pixel is and then adjust the whole image so it remains the same while matching the brightnest pixel using the dimmest backlight possible. Tricks like those might explain why the slowest panels on this roundup are almost exactly two frames slower than the fastest: one frame delay to shift the frame in the memory buffer while applying filters and searching for the brightest pixel, another frame delay to shift the frame out to the panel with adjusted brightness.
Many LCDs do a lot more than simply dumping signal straight from the input to the display controller.
I wish threads that got bumped by spammers would stop bouncing back into my "new updates" list every time spam gets added and removed. I must have come back to this thread with the above post as most recent more than a dozen times by now.
I wish the forum would delete "new update" notifications when the newest post in a thread is older than the notification after spam got deleted.