Both panels in today’s review are wide-gamut monitors, designed to render 100 percent of the Adobe RGB 1998 color space. This means that more of the visible spectrum of color is displayed. If you look at the CIE charts below, you’ll see the fin-shaped area that represents all the color visible to the human eye. The triangle formed by the three primary colors is the gamut actually shown by the display. The Adobe RGB 1998 gamut extends the sRGB/Rec 709 spec by about 30 percent, mostly towards the green region of the chart. We adjusted our graphs to show both screens’ measurements relative to the larger color space.
Color gamut is measured using a saturation sweep that samples the six main colors (red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow) at five saturation levels (20, 40, 60, 80, and 100%). This provides a more realistic view of color accuracy. Since there are no color management controls on either monitor, we're only showing the post-calibration graphs (although we’re sure they'd look pretty much the same out-of-box).
HP ZR30w
The ZR30w tracks the larger gamut pretty well except for the red primary and magenta secondary colors, which are a little over-saturated. The rest of the color points are quite good with only tiny errors at all five saturation levels. This is excellent performance. Color luminance is a little hot for green, blue, and cyan, but very good for red, magenta, and yellow. We recommend creating a custom monitor profile for any screen intended for precise photo and graphics work. This way, small errors can be compensated for and matched to your camera and output devices.
Double Sight DS-309W
Overall performance is a little better on the DoubleSight. Like the HP, red and magenta are slightly oversaturated. Color luminance is low for red, blue, and magenta, but nearly perfect for the other colors. The DS-309W does squeak under the average Delta E three line with a value of 2.5. This is excellent performance.
Here is how both panels compare to other recently-tested monitors.

None of the monitors in the group have any significant color accuracy issues. Even though the HP is on the bottom, its value of 3.5 is respectable. Remember that this is an average of 30 measurements. All of the screens offer professional-level color quality. The Samsung S27B970D continues to lead this benchmark, followed closely by the value champ, Auria's EQ276W.
Gamut Volume: Adobe RGB 1998
There are basically two categories of displays in use today: those that conform to the sRGB/Rec 709 standard like HDTVs, and wide-gamut panels that show as much as 100 percent of the Adobe RGB 1998 spec. We use Gamutvision to calculate the gamut volume, based on an ICC profile created from actual measurements.

The DS-309W displays a tick more of the Adobe RGB 1998 gamut than the ZR30w. The difference is negligible and not visible to the naked eye. The other screens are sRGB monitors and display the correct 68-72 percent gamut as they should. If you watch video or play games on either of the screens in today’s review, you will see that reds and greens look a little unnatural. It is important to match a display to its intended content. Unless you need the extra color saturation available on these panels, you may be dissatisfied with the color rendering of typical image content. We’d love to see selectable color gamuts on monitors like these. Any panel that renders Adobe RGB 1998 is capable of rendering sRGB. Many consumer TVs have this feature, so there’s no reason to omit it on a computer monitor.
- 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.