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Dell Selling 30" Flat Panels
bling..bling writes "Apple is not the only company selling 30" flat panel monitors. Dell is now offering a 30" flat panel display that has a native resolution of 2560x1600 and sells for $2,199. Just like the apple 30" display you do need a dual link DVI video card to drive this massive beast. This monitor also sports four USB ports and a media card reader.
I've been waiting for Dell or someone else to release a 30" display and hopefully bring the prices down. I'm tired of the dual monitor thing, I want one display device on my desk, just make it a very large device.
See the details on Dell's web site on the new Dell 3007WFP 30-inch widescreen digital flat panel monitor."
Can't thet cut to the chase, how many dead pixels can i get stuck with? as their policy only seems to state:
And 2560x1600 is alot bigger than640x480
Plus for that price, I think i prefer 2 samsung high quality 19" flat panels with no dead pixels
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
From Dell. That'd only cost you about $1600, and you could spend the other $600 on a good video card. You'd get a resolution of 2400x1920.
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore?family=AppleDisplays
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
* A higher contrast ratio is of course also possible if you get a different backlight and chooses the measuring point to give you that number, but if the response times are indeed lower, or different, it seems they realyy have a different panel. On the other hand, one could technically squeeze a bit of response time difference from using a different signal chip in the monitor.
One of these monitors costs the same as 4 of Gateways FPD2185W widescreens. I know that it is a larger monitor, but would not 3-4 rotatable 20 inch wide screens be a better, more useful investment for most people?
Why would anyone want to spend $2000 on a monitor? For half the cost (and this isn't even a great example), I'd sooner buy a projector that gives me up to 300inches of view space. Not to mention I can watch movies on it, too.
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Seriously what the heck are you talking about? HP doesn't make a 30" display the biggest LCD flat panel monitor they sell is the HP L2335 which is a 23" widescreen display. As for Apple they have only been selling the 30" monitor for about a year now. So in terms of the technology being commercially available, yeah it's kind of new. With Dell just releasing the second 30" flat panel monitor on the market. So it's news... Not seriously big news in the grand world of computing, but news none the less.
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This monitor also sports four USB ports and a media card reader.
Be careful, there is a problem with that!
I have a Dell 2405FPW and it has the same ports and readers. When the monitor is switched off, the power supply to this subsystem is cut as well (and apparently it is not powered from the PC USB bus).
I leave my PC switched on all the time, and switch off the monitor when I am not using it. The PC continues to perform server functions.
The result is that every switch off and on of the display it will go through the USB hardware discovery cycle, find all the cardreaders, and try to read all card types. This results in a massive amount of log messages and a very slow PC for 5-10 seconds.
The manual tells about this, but I think many users would not think about it when reading the feature list.
Fortunately, the monitor has multiple inputs (VGA, DVI, S-Video, Composite, Component) and when switching to one of the TV inputs it goes to standby mode when no signal is present. So as a workaround, I switch it off by setting S-Video input and back on by selecting DVI again. Not as convenient, as it needs multiple button clicks to do so.
You can get this monitor for $1800 or less if you claim you are a small business (they don't check) and speak to one of the reps in the small business department of Dell. More importantly, If you wait a bit, some great deal will show up. Wait until a $1500 or less deal and grab it then. I got my 2001FP for 860 when it used to cost $1200 and my 2405FPW for $915 when it used to cost $1500 so I'm familiar with Dell deals.
This price is ridiculous for a Dell, you can get the apple 30" for $100 more with student discount. And we all know the kinds of margins Apple has.
Done. Here are the results for my 2 month old Dell 2005FPW, which has been on for about 2 hours before calibration.
Max brightness: 250 cd/m^2 at 100, but dropped 1 cd/m^2 EVERY SECOND I left it at that setting(and oddly enough, when I brought the setting back to 0, luminance climbed slightly over 5-10 seconds, then dropped back to 178-179). 0 is anywhere from 178.2-180.
Guess what? 250cd/m^2, or 250 lumens, is run of the mill. Dell claims an additional 50 lumens. To put that in perspective, that's as if the display had a brightness setting of around "200"(well, a little less, but you get the idea.)
Dell also claims a 600:1 contrast ratio. Except the calibration device measured a minimum luminance of .4 cd/m^2. 180 divided by .4 = 450:1 contrast ratio.
Apple claims a contrast ratio of 400:1 and a max luminance of 250cd/m2 on the Cinema 20", which is supposedly the same exact screen (but different front "glass" and backlight, I believe). How 'bout that.
Please help metamoderate.
You're confusing dual connections with dual-link. A dual-link connection is required for any resolution over 2048x1536. If you want to drive two monitors over 2048x1536, you need two separate dual-link DVI connections.
Most video cards don't support dual-link at all. Those that do tend to support only one dual-link connection, even if they have two DVI connectors. So, you can only have one 30" display and one smaller (2048x1536 or less) display.
The only current card that I know of that supports two dual-link connections (i.e., can drive two 30" displays) is the nVidia Quattro FX 4500, which costs over $1500.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Actually, the limit for single link dvi is 1920x1200 with somewhat "standard" timing (reduced blanking but still 60Hz). It's possible to drive much larger resolutions if you're willing to sacrifice refresh rate, though the problem is a lot of monitors (and possibly graphic drivers as well) won't support it.
The radeon x1800 series also have dual dual link dvi, not exactly cheap but a lot cheaper than those workstation cards.
55'' minimum - This is a plasma tv replacement, not a replacement for the LCD sitting on your desk.
all the new 15 and 17in powerbooks have duallink; so works with both apple and dell.
but even with some small difference in price ($100-300 is small as fraction of the total), i definitely would prefer the apple. 30in monster with black plastic frame and dell logo? and with apple, i know about their rather helpful policy if problems appear.
It's a nice unit. No embedded controls, except for brightness, so you need to use your graphics card control panel to make adjustments. Some minor uniformity problems with the backlight, but good D6500 color temperature tracking.
Oh, and Civ4 looks great at 2560x1600 ;-)
With these mammoth LCDs that require dual DVI inputs... Is it possible to hook them up to a lower-end video card (eg, my laptop) and run them at a lower resolution?
:) I have the potential to periodically turn my computer into a non-booting doorstop. For those times when I'm in such a pinch, I'm going to buy a cheap $50 single-link DVI card to hook up to the big-ass monitor for troubleshooting. I'm sure the BIOS and boot disk video will look horrible, but then I hope I won't have to spend much time at all in there anyway :)
:)
I recently went to an Apple store and asked the fellow behind the Genius Bar the same question, and we did some in-store experimentation. So my experience has been:
1) It doesn't require "dual DVI inputs", it requires a single "dual-link DVI input". The difference is basically that the DVI bus can actually have two transmitters running over a single line, which allows it to pump way more pixels. So instead of taking a dual-head DVI video card and hooking up both connectors to this monitor, you take a recent, powerful DVI card and hook up only one connector to this monitor. (I was under this misconception for a while, so I post this in order to clarify for others...) You can find out more detailed information about the DVI analog and digital, single- and dual-link configurations here.
2) As long as you have a genuinely digital DVI feed (rather than, e.g., an analog one generated by a VGA-DVI converter-- again, see the DataPro link above for details)... yes you can hook up a card using a single-link DVI transmitter to such a monitor. The Apple Cinema Display scales up the resolution as necessary, so that your 1600x1024 will in fact fill the entire screen; I can't speak for the Dell, but I imagine the behavior's the same. However, the final effect looks pretty terrible.
The upshot: I used to have two machines hooked up to a single 20" CRT, and both were managed by KVM. When I buy a 30" Cinema HD display from Apple sometime in the next few weeks, I'm going to hook it up to the G5 and operate the PC in a window through Remote Desktop, or VNC when I have it booted from a Linux drive. But since I write Windows drivers for a hobby (that's loadable kernel modules to you Linux folk
*snort* Today's captcha == "optical"
There is: it's a program called Ultramon (there is also a much buggier free program which does the same thing). Most vid cards will also let you stretch the task bar across both monitors.
It also adds such nice things as an extra button at the top right of the window to send it to the other monitor, and I believe keyboard shortcuts to do the same (and to turn off a monitor).
Granted, it'd be nice if windows came with such functionality built in and in all honesty I'd probably find having my menu bar on the other monitor much more annoying than my taskbar.
Cheaper to buy it from Dell Canada at $1,999 AKA $1665US or so.
x ?sku=222-0863&c=ca&l=en&cs=CABSDT1&category_id=619 8&first=true&page=productlisting.aspx
http://accessories.dell.com/sna/ProductDetail.asp
The other half, however, is inherent in their single shared menu design. Yes, I know about the usability studies, but the majority of those stem from the time when most Apples had a single 9" screen.
I can't speak to "the majority", but I've never heard of any studies done on a 9" screen.
In "Tog on Interface" (p.202), he mentions some user testing he did do:
- first, on a 12" screen
- then, on a 21" screen to the left of a 13" screen that the actual app is on
In the second test, users had to change the color of 10 folders, one at a time, by selecting it on the right display, and choosing a menuitem from the menubar on the left display. And this was *not* "pull-down menus from a single menubar, vs pull-down menus in the window". This test compared pull-down menus in a single menubar (on the wrong display) to pop-up menus directly under the mouse pointer! (Spoiler: the menubar won.)
His results were similar to those reported by Walker and Smelcer, CHI'89.
As such, I'd like an option to "echo" the menu bar onto each monitor, reducing at least half of the problem.
The problem with solutions of this type is that when presented with two ways to do something, people tend to take longer deciding which one to use, than if they'd simply used the slower of the two methods.
As somebody who's done a decent amount of user testing, yes, this is weird, but it's also quite true: adding a second, faster way to do something often slows people down. (Amateur psych: maybe it's because people think if there are two, there must be a difference, so one is right and one is wrong.)
No, according to this chart. It also lacks the picture-in-a-picture feature that I did not realize that the less huge Dell monitors have.
Still, it's a really cool product, and I am still leaning toward requesting one.