Dell 3007 vs 3008 Monitor [Archive] - Quarter To Three Forums

Desslock

05-24-2009, 02:41 PM

The Dell 3008 30" monitor is hella expensive compared to the 3007 (presale, it goes for about $2150 Cdn. vs $1600 Cdn.) - at first I was naturally inclined towards the newer tech, but after further consideration, it seems like the 3007 might actually be the better gaming monitor:

3008 - has a scaler, better inputs, better contrast
3007 - no scaler

If you're just going to use the monitor as a computer monitor, and for gaming, it seems like the scaler has no benefits (since your video card will handle the resolution scaling) and introduces significant input lag (even when running at native resolution, it causes response times in the 30-35ms according to most reports).

Since the 3007 is often on sale for a few hundred less, it seems like it would be the better choice as a gaming monitor -- but wondered if any of the hardware gurus had opinions on any of the above, or on the improvements in picture quality in 3008 (which, again, seem to not be of much use other than offering better black/color depth when playing movies from an external DVD player, etc.).

Thoughts/comments?

Case

05-24-2009, 03:47 PM

3007 or3007-HC? If the latter, the gamut is still 93% of Adobe rgb, so doesn't actually suck.

mashakos

05-24-2009, 06:38 PM

If you're just going to use the monitor as a computer monitor, and for gaming, it seems like the scaler has no benefits ... and introduces significant input lag
yes.

You can also do what I did with the money saved, and get a $350 Blackmagic Intensity Pro capture card. Has tons of inputs and negligible input lag (1-2ms) mainly due to DirectShow. It has HDMI but is not HDCP compliant (for protecting those precious blurays from being captured) but 1080i component is good enough. Here's a screen cap to give you an idea of the quality:
PS3 dashboard (http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/9826/dash.jpg)
Bluray movie (http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/7527/bluraya.jpg)

So you get to save a few hundred bucks and can spend it on video input hardware that's not grafted to your monitor.

The joy of PC hardware - choice :D

EDIT:

but wondered if any of the hardware gurus had opinions on any of the above, or on the improvements in picture quality in 3008 (which, again, seem to not be of much use other than offering better black/color depth when playing movies from an external DVD player, etc.).
if you want high contrast, saturation and depth in colours you can play with ffdshow's filters to your heart's content. With the addition of yadif, I pulled off a feature found in high end 50-60" plasma screens (http://kuro9g.blogspot.com/2008/11/purecinema-film-mode.html): deinterlacing with doubled framerate. 1080i runs at 30fps deinterlaced, doubling the framerate brings it to a comfortable 60fps.

Quaro

05-24-2009, 06:40 PM

Desslock

05-25-2009, 01:45 AM

3007 or3007-HC? If the latter, the gamut is still 93% of Adobe rgb, so doesn't actually suck.

Yeah, the one still being sold, so the 3007-HC. It actually sounds like of the 2, that's the better choice for a pure PC Gaming monitor.

Coca Cola Zero

05-25-2009, 02:08 AM

I can't figure out wide gamut monitors. Looks like the color will only be correct while in Photoshop or FF3 other apps that support color management? In normal apps the colors will always be blown out way more than an RGB monitor? Can that be right? I have a 2408wfp on the way and am thinking it will drive me nuts next to me 2405 in non supported apps.

This is true but it can be mitigated in various ways.

I've got the 2408wpf myself and in normal wide gamut mode it color calibrates really well but in non-color-correction-aware apps the red tones were really overwhelming, like skin tones would be pinkie-red to an annoying degree.

The 2408wfp has an sRGB mode you can switch it into though which gives you a nice 'standard' PC style display where colors look pretty good in all apps, but at the cost of losing true wide-gamut support.

After trying a bunch of things I eventually went with keeping the monitor in wide gamut mode but pulling the red down a bit (the monitor also has a custom color mode where you can set the R/G/B levels) and then color calibrating. The results are really good -- very good print color matching to my PIXMA 9000 printer and pretty decent looking color in non-color-managed apps.

chequers

05-25-2009, 03:54 AM

I did this same comparison at the 24" price point about six months ago. My conclusion (after buying one of each and comparing) was that the non-UltraSharp is fine for everything but:

Movies
When you care about colour accurate image/video manip., and
Stuff with single-pixel crosshatch patterns (which looked terrible when scrolling).I'd be surprised if anything had changed about that at the 30" price point. (For the record, I have two 24" ultrasharps now.)

Desslock

05-25-2009, 12:00 PM

I did this same comparison at the 24" price point about six months ago. My conclusion (after buying one of each and comparing) was that the non-UltraSharp is fine for everything but..

It's not the same comparison - both the 3007WFP-HC and the 3008WFP are ultrasharps. The main difference between the two is lack of a scaler, which would be important if you wanted to attach non-PC input sources.

Quaro

05-25-2009, 12:22 PM

This is true but it can be mitigated in various ways.

I've got the 2408wpf myself and in normal wide gamut mode it color calibrates really well but in non-color-correction-aware apps the red tones were really overwhelming, like skin tones would be pinkie-red to an annoying degree.

The 2408wfp has an sRGB mode you can switch it into though which gives you a nice 'standard' PC style display where colors look pretty good in all apps, but at the cost of losing true wide-gamut support.

After trying a bunch of things I eventually went with keeping the monitor in wide gamut mode but pulling the red down a bit (the monitor also has a custom color mode where you can set the R/G/B levels) and then color calibrating. The results are really good -- very good print color matching to my PIXMA 9000 printer and pretty decent looking color in non-color-managed apps.

Thanks. Printing is a complete non-concern. I do web stuff so I need to see things the way the average person on the web sees them. The reviews seem to indicate that having wide gamut would make me an outlier and I'd be color correcting all my stuff for a tiny niche of wide gamut viewers, but to everyone else it would look way off. If I can get it mostly correct I can probably just double check with the RGB 2405 and be okay.

Coca Cola Zero

05-25-2009, 02:09 PM

Thanks. Printing is a complete non-concern. I do web stuff so I need to see things the way the average person on the web sees them. The reviews seem to indicate that having wide gamut would make me an outlier and I'd be color correcting all my stuff for a tiny niche of wide gamut viewers, but to everyone else it would look way off. If I can get it mostly correct I can probably just double check with the RGB 2405 and be okay.

Yeah in your situation you can switch the 2408 to sRGB mode via the monitor menus and be good to go. Switching it over to sRGB gives you a pretty standard type of color response which is what you want if that is what the audience for your content is using.

Desslock

05-26-2009, 09:16 AM

Meh, I am now leaning back towards the the Ultrasharp 2709W.

It's still bigger than my current 24" monitor, and 1920x1200 just seems so much more practical as a gaming resolution, and I'm worried about how the 3007-HC will look at 1920x1200 instead of its default resolution.

Plus there's such a huge price difference between the 2709 and the 3007 ($600+ difference), let alone the 3008 ($1100+ difference)

chequers

05-26-2009, 08:26 PM

It's not the same comparison - both the 3007WFP-HC and the 3008WFP are ultrasharps. The main difference between the two is lack of a scaler, which would be important if you wanted to attach non-PC input sources.
Actually, I compared the 2408WFP against the older 2407WFP, but it's still different in terms of the bells & whistles.

Desslock

05-27-2009, 06:26 AM

Actually, I compared the 2408WFP against the older 2407WFP, but it's still different in terms of the bells & whistles.

There are improvements in the latest in terms of contrast depth, etc. -- you just mentioned non-ultrasharp, so I thought you were referring to the much cheaper 24" that Dell sells (which is still decent and certainly fine for work, etc.)

Quaro

06-07-2009, 11:10 AM

So the 2408wfp is driving me nuts... maybe. Spent way too much time tweaking it. I'm happy for awhile and then I go to twitter.com or open up Excel and a few colors just burn my eyes out.

I'm still mystified by the whole wide gamut concept. All the high end monitors are wide gamut -- I'm having trouble finding a non TN panel with standard. It only works in Photoshop. It is much less accurate than a cheapo panel in everything else. Games, Word, the icons on my desktop, movies, whatever. There are no color managed video players! (the DVD/BD space is basically standard RGB).

You'd think the drivers would take care of this. A non color aware app sends up some 8 bit RGB values, say FF0000, and the drivers send DD1111 or whatever to your monitor. Why does the APP have to support this? Until my DVI cable can send 16 bit values I can't see another way to do this.

I looked into Windows 7, totally willing to upgrade if it fixes this. Turn out better color management support just means the file browser and internal file viewer are color managed. It doesn't even fix your desktop background. Bleh.

Oh, and an awesomely lacking feature of FF, the only web browser that supports color management -- it only loads one monitor profile and it doesn't know which monitor it's on, so if you have multiple monitors, it's almost useless.

Coca Cola Zero

06-07-2009, 02:57 PM

I looked into Windows 7, totally willing to upgrade if it fixes this. Turn out better color management support just means the file browser and internal file viewer are color managed. It doesn't even fix your desktop background. Bleh.

Annoyingly, in Windows 7 the image file viewer isn't color managed when you switch it to fullscreen slideshows (though it is in windowed mode)... much better than Vista and XP, though.. at least they are making some improvements.

I've felt your pain but eventually came up with a setup I'm happy with. As I mentioned before it involved playing around with the individual R G B settings inside the monitor's menus (Go to Preset Modes/Custom RGB) while color calibrating with a Spyder3. I doubt my values will map exactly to your system but I wound up with RGB settings of:

Red 97, Green 89, Blue 94

And then on the brightness/contrast menu:

Brightness 4, Contrast 50

I then color calibrated the display a final time with these settings and get spectacular print color matching while my non-color-managed apps are tolerably close to correct... much better than the extreme red tint that occurs when you run the monitor in its default "Desktop" mode.

Pulling the brightness way down may not be something you need to do if you're not print matching but the monitor (like virtually all new LCDs) is just wayy wayyy too bright at 100, IMO.

Coca Cola Zero

06-07-2009, 03:06 PM

Also, as I mentioned previously if you really don't care about the wide-gamut stuff you can switch the monitor to sRGB mode and it does a good imitation of a standard non-wide-gamut LCD monitor. I understand doing this may have a negative psychological impact though, of feeling like you're missing out on a "feature" you paid for.

Quaro

06-07-2009, 03:50 PM

It's not so much that I'm missing out on a feature but that it's noticeably worse in apps which don't support color management than the 2405 sitting right next to it. I can completely understand people who are in photoshop all day long buying these monitors, but they're selling them to everyone?

I've read that a lot of people got something decent by desaturating the colors in the ATI control panel, then calibrating off that, but I can't seem to mimic that in the nvidia panel (the saturation slider only goes up in nvidia).

I did try the sRGB mode but it's really, really flat compared to the actual standard gamut monitor next to me. Unfortunately they don't let you set custom RGB values in that mode which is what you really need to do.

I'll give your settings a try though, thanks! In my own screwing around, I couldn't seems to take the edge off the extreme colors without also killing the whites in regular apps.

So with the managed FF on the new screen and Chrome on the old screen -- the colors match perfectly! Just don't cross the browsers... heh.

Desslock

06-23-2009, 10:50 AM

3007 or3007-HC? If the latter, the gamut is still 93% of Adobe rgb, so doesn't actually suck.

Final thoughts on 3007-HC vs 3008 monitor? Sounds like the 3007-HC is the better choice as a PC monitor, in addition to being $500 cheaper, because of the lag-producing 3008 scaler. 3008 has better inputs, but that doesn't matter, and better contrast ratio, although all of the comments I've heard (including from Case above) have said the 3007-HC certainly doesn't stink for PQ, since it obviously was state of the art until last year.

The 3007-HC is on sale for $700 off ($899 Canadian) today only, so I'm thinking of pulling the trigger...

Case

06-23-2009, 11:20 AM

You're overanalyzing. Go for it. If I could find one for $899 US, I'd buy another one.

Final thoughts on 3007-HC vs 3008 monitor? Sounds like the 3007-HC is the better choice as a PC monitor, in addition to being $500 cheaper, because of the lag-producing 3008 scaler. 3008 has better inputs, but that doesn't matter, and better contrast ratio, although all of the comments I've heard (including from Case above) have said the 3007-HC certainly doesn't stink for PQ, since it obviously was state of the art until last year.

The 3007-HC is on sale for $700 off ($899 Canadian) today only, so I'm thinking of pulling the trigger...

Desslock

07-02-2009, 11:31 AM

You're overanalyzing. Go for it. If I could find one for $899 US, I'd buy another one.

Got it! Love it! $899cdn with free shipping is pretty amazing. But out of the box it clearly needed some calibration tweaking - gamma/contrast were way off, in particular. Brightness naturally too high too.

I think I got things pretty close to perfect just using Nvidia's display optimization and the stuff at this handy site: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/contrast.php. What other monitor calibration tools are available? I heard about a software program called Spyder 3, but it seems very expensive and primarily oriented towards graphic/imaging/photographers. Any other help?

Also, is it better to tweak the brightness setting using the hardware setting (the only calibration option with this monitor, which is kinda sad), or using the nvidia display tweaks, or does it make any difference?

This monitor makes first person perspective games brand new again...

Bleeding Edge

07-02-2009, 01:35 PM

Spyder is actually both a hardware and software product. Here's a review at Dan's Data (http://www.dansdata.com/spyder.htm). I played around with one my brother had a few years back, and while it's a cool little device I just couldn't see spending $200 on something I'm really only going to use a few times.

prolix

07-02-2009, 03:13 PM

You can get Spyder2Express, which uses the same hardware as its more expensive cousins, for about $60 US. It's practically a requirement if you do any kind of digital imaging. If you don't, then eyeballing your calibration with the tools you've been using is probably good enough.

Case

09-22-2009, 03:04 PM

Okay, I just pulled the trigger on a 3008WFP. Dell had a $300 off special, at $1399.

Desslock

09-23-2009, 12:37 AM

Okay, I just pulled the trigger on a 3008WFP. Dell had a $300 off special, at $1399.

Got to love Dell's end-of-quarter deals. Let us know what you think after some time with it.

I like the 3007-HC a lot, with one important caveat - only at its default resolutions. The lack of a hardware scaler makes a much bigger difference than I expected - software scaling through the video card just doesn't look anywhere near as good. And at that high resolution, that means you really have to plan to stay on top of the video card market if you want to continue to play the latest games at their best.

BaconTastesGood

06-04-2010, 12:01 AM

Any wisdom on the latest in 27-30" monitor tech and best tech/deals?

mkozlows

06-04-2010, 07:04 AM

30" monitors are really shockingly static. Dell's 3008-HC is still their newest 30" monitor and is still expensive. HP recently introduced a new 30" one that Anandtech reviewed medium-positively.

BaconTastesGood

06-04-2010, 07:46 AM

Apparently Apple's 30" is like a million years old too and totally outdone by their 27"?

I've been using this HP LP3065 for 3 years now and it's been solid as a rock, but it doesn't support all the new fangled stuff like DisplayPort and HDMI, it's just dual-DVI. If I get a new Mac or whatever I guess that'll still work.

Linoleum

06-04-2010, 07:54 AM

Case

06-04-2010, 12:44 PM

I now have three 30-inch monitors on my desk.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitpic/photos/large/76287343.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=0ZRYP5X5F6FSMBCCSE82&Expires=1275681475&Signature=jUDdV%2B8BQ%2B5VQXbz%2BqpOxp2fmvs%3D

The right side is the Dell 3008 WFP. It's connected to a Radeon HD 5870 via displayport.
I also use that monitor via one of its DVI connections to test graphics cards,
using my graphics test system.

The center one is an HP LP3065. Very sweet, and a better ergonomic stand than
either Dell.

The left side is a Dell 3007 WFP.

The LP3065 and 3007 WFP are attached via the HD 5870 DVI ports.

Oh, and HP has a new, billion color 30-inch display, the ZR30w (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3754/a-new-30-contender-hp-zr30w-review).

And it's introductory price is lower than the LP 3065.

BaconTastesGood

06-04-2010, 12:59 PM

I'm hoping there's a refresh for the Apple 30", since I really like the idea of integrated Web cam and mic and speakers along with a charging port for a Mac Pro.

The 3065, which is what I have, is 3+ years old at this point, and the ZR30w supposedly is the same thing but 'greener' in terms of the environment.

Seriously, is there just no research effort into 30" panels right now? It seems that the 24-27" stuff is outstripping the 30" in terms of quality and features.

mkozlows

06-04-2010, 01:10 PM

Seriously, is there just no research effort into 30" panels right now? It seems that the 24-27" stuff is outstripping the 30" in terms of quality and features.

That seems to be the case, honestly. And I can see why: I've been a big proponent of using high-quality monitors since forever, and have always used the best monitor that I could afford (or, in the case of the 14" SVGA Trinitron on our old 386, that I could talk my dad into buying). But a 30" monitor is... almost too much. It seems like for any reasonable purpose I can think of, I'd be better served with two 24" monitors.