Hello, first post... *waves*.

I now have two of these sitting on the desk. Spent about a month with one, and two weeks with both, brandishing a hardware calibrator for a week as well, so I guess I have more experience messing with these things than the average reader. Felt like sharing my experiences for the benefit of others, so here goes.

General Aesthetics, Noise, and Heat

OK, so the stand is a love it or hate it affair, and I love it. Really, I think it looks perfectly nice and far better than the Dell 2408WFP's. The cable management thingy is crap though as someone else mentioned.

Frame and bezel aren't that thin but thin enough that two displays side by side aren't horrible. I'd guestimate the thickness at around 3/4inch around the panel and depth at about 2 inches.

Build quality... could be better. It's generally OK but some of the panel parts don't feel too robust, particularly the cable management and some loose bits of frame. It's certainly not bad, but not what I'd consider good for a "performance"/"business" monitor.

Heat

As for heat, yes it does get warm. I've lost my temperature probe but I put it at about 30-35 degrees celcius right now, room temp is a chilly 15'c. It's warmer at the top right than top left, but neither is going to be much of an issue. Maybe this has some effect on the tinting issue below, as I've noticed its slightly worse when my room temp is colder.

Noise With my ear to the top of the screen, there is a slight buzzing sound, very mild, around 50 Hz and fairly plasticky sounding - bit like a slow fan with something touching the blades as it spins. Adjusting the brightness from 0 to 100 has no effect on the noise. It is completely inaudible from the front even with my ear touching the panel (then again my room isn't silent, I'd put background noise at about 25-30dB). From the top I can only hear it from <10cm away, above that it's difficult to spot. It's the same on both of them (Hardware rev GIG111).

Image Quality

From what I can see, text is perfectly fine, both with ClearType on default settings and disabled on both monitors. No fringing or discolouration, it's perfectly sharp with good contrast and easily readable from 4-5 feet away.

Colours, sharpness and contrast are generally great. Wide gamut is noticeable in dumb apps but not a problem (see below for my opinion on wide gamut). In calibrated apps, it is excellent.

Gamut and Colour

OK so there's a lot of ho-hum about this monitor being wide-gamut. Personally I'm all in favour of it, and think people should stop complaining and furthermore, stop spreading misinformation, but that's my opinion. My opinion is highly polarized and is as follows. If you are easily offended, skip this section.

Proper calibration will allow the monitor to represent sRGB colours perfectly accurately and "fix" the wide gamut "problem" contrary to what many people are arguing. Yes, this only works in colour managed apps, if you don't like the saturation in non-managed apps, turn it down. Every modern graphics card (including laptops) lets you do this. For those who complain about this method being "inaccurate", you're using a non-colour managed app, it was never going to be accurate in the first place.

I liken the whole thing to having a fast car. Is it the car's fault for being too fast (monitor having wide gamut)? No. Lay off the damn throttle (turn the colours down). That's what the speedometer is there for (calibration). If you don't have a calibrator, download a predefined profile someone else made - this won't be perfect but it will let windows and your apps know what gamut your monitor is capable of producing - i.e. if how fast the car will go if you push the throttle to 100%. Then your system or apps can reduce the colour saturation until you get the desired result by referring to this. Again, the ability of the monitor to produce more colours is not a "problem", it's a benefit. If you don't want it going that far all the time, don't tell it to. There's a control for that. Turn it down. It's that simple. It's like Brightness - it's too bright out of the box... Is that a monitor fault? No, you just turn it down.

I know many people argue a standard sRGB monitor will be "more accurate" and easier to use if you want everything as sRGB - I do acknowledge this point. You'll need to muck around less with the settings and it'll be closer without calibration. If, and only if, all you ever do will be sRGB, and colour accuracy is not an issue for you. *Points at gamers*.

As far as actual usage goes, yes I do notice games are more saturated than on my old monitor. No I don't find it annoying, I like it. Sometimes it does seem a little over-the-top but then I turn it down. I also do photography work - and aside from the tinting again, it's excellent. For movies, it's also great - can't fault it at all - though see further down. Vista's desktop background and photo preview app appears to be colour-managed but fullscreen slideshow view isn't.

Here's a gamut plot with respective spectral readings, for those interested, HP LP2475w top, shabby old 17" TN sRGB bottom.



Calibration

As for calibration tools - my university lends out hardware calibrators for free, as do many others I suspect. For those who don't or are not affiliated with such, you can rent them from private companies. In the UK, Calumet (a big professional photographic equipment hire outfit) rents out hardware calibrators for about £25.

Anyway, that aside, the colour representation of this monitor is great, after calibration, and aside from the green/pink tint (see below) makes it superb value for money.

The gamma curve is a perfect 2.2, and really needs no adjustment, and the colour channels are pretty much the same. In a LUT of 16.7 million colours, after calibration I still have around 15.9 - 16.2 million remaining, so barely any loss there. In comparision, my shabby old 17" TN ends up with 12.4 million remaining colours (losing 4.3 million) and really bad curves. See below for example compensation curves - left is the LP2475w, right is the old 17" TN. Since the further away from a straight line it is, the more correction needs applying, you can see it's pretty good by default.



Brightness/Contrast

After calibration, I am getting around 750:1 contrast ratio (sometimes measures 800+ but never more than 900), up to 340cd/m² brightness (only hits 400+ with really off colour temperature settings). Set to minimum, brightness drops just below 100cd/m² though the exact values depend on your calibration and RGB settings. I find that about 10-12 gets 120cd/m² and 16-18 on the OSD gives 140cd/m² (my standard calibration is at 140).

The panel uses partial panel blocking? at lower brightness levels - in fact just about anything below high (see below).

Don't set the contrast above 80. It's broken. R and B are fully saturated, G goes on way further to make it look brighter but just breaks the colour balance.

Colour Accuracy

Is excellent after calibration, and pretty crap before. DeltaE 94 reads average 0.26 maximum 0.74 after calibration:



See profile name in the SS for the settings I used (17 brightness, 75 contrast, 255 R, 236 G, 253 B). The target here was D65 white point and 140cd/m² brightness.

Black levels/IPS glow

Black level when looking from head on is great, varying between 0.15cd/m² at brightness set to 0 up to around 0.45cd/m² when brightness is set to max.

Off centre-white "glow" is noticeable in a darkened room but not a problem. Completely un-noticeable in a daylight-lit room right now, viewing this page with the black background, the reflection of my black jacket is brighter than the glow - and even that is barely visible at all.

Viewing movies in a blackened room can make it slightly worse, especially with black bars at the top and bottom, if you're looking from an angle >30' these can seem lighter or darker than each other.

It's only really irritating on a completely black background to be honest, but if all you're looking at is a completely black background, you might as well just turn the monitor off

Green/pink Tint

Unfortunately, I'm stuck with this issue on both monitors, though the direction of the gradient is different. The second was sent as a replacement from HP after the first developed this issue. It is not going away over time, in fact appears to be getting worse. Support are escalating it to second line (see below).

Both the affected panels were hardware revision GIG111 manufactured (assembled?) in the Czech Republic. Old firmware GIG044, new firmware GIG052. Manufacture dates November and December 2008 respectively. Old one started developing it after about two weeks of use (150 backlight hours) and is now at 350 hours and not getting any better. New one is currently at 91 hours and I notice it worsening. Second one also has considerable backlight bleed at the bottom left.

Also, I notice the tinting is worse at lower bightness settings, and almost un-noticeable at default/max brightness (80-100) but gets quite irritating at brightness levels below 50 on the OSD.

Having the two firmwares let me do a comparison with input lag as well (See below) - there is a considerable improvement going from GIG044 to GIG052.

Support

Monitor is supported directly by HP's Workstation dept. as you might already know. Support is good once you actually get through to them, I had to be put through four departments the first time (Including india). Usually minimal wait, 30 seconds tops, and polite, English-speaking reps are on the other end. It doesn't matter where you purchase from, support is always dealt with directly by HP. As far as getting my replacement was concerned, there were a couple basic questions (Did you try changing the OSD settings, etc. - Of course), but they stopped well before it got to the point where you feel like you're being treated like an idiot. Bravo HP!

They did offer an engineer to come out next day to replace the old one, but turns out later on that they made a mistake and instead dropshipped a replacement from the Netherlands. They said it was "Head/panel" only but shipped a full box with everything in it! There's a label on the side for UPS to collect and return the old one free of charge - I haven't done this yet. No deposit or credit card details were required, they simply sent out a new £400 monitor no-questions-asked! As it stands I now have two sitting on my desk, while they sort out what second line are going to do as they think shipping another replacement is nonsensical. Some people have said revision GIG122 is better, I'll ask them about this when they get back to me.

Input Lag/Gaming

Input lag on my old one (GIG044 firmware) was noticeable but not a problem. Unfortunately I don't have a CRT to produce a measurement against, but it is around one frame behind my old VGA-Only 17" TN (which was in fact very fast!). This was measured both from the Lagom.nl test as well as simply dragging windows around or mirroring a movie onto it. For gaming, it never got in the way in TF2 (the only FPS I regularly play), and it's still easy enough to get to the top of the scoreboard

Input lag on the new one (GIG052 firmware) is around 15ms lower than on the older firmware - or basically a whole frame less, putting it back on par with a cheapo 17" TN. This was tested using the Lagom test, both fed over DVI. Yes, I swapped the DVI cables between the two in case the port was biasing it, the result was the same. The newer firmware has definately reduced input lag, by nearly a full frame. - as both hardware revisions were identical (GIG111).

Movies

Watching movies on this thing is a joy. I usually turn up the brightness to maximum but don't need to bother loading up my high-brightness calibration settings. Colour reproduction is excellent, and I never feel that the wide gamut is oversaturating it at all - in fact I think it looks better this way. That's just my personal opinion and preference, of course.

One thing I should mention though, and thats the:

Composite input

It'll take a composite feed all good and well, but there are a few problems. For example, feeding it off my PC at 1920x1080i, the image is shifted a bit off centre (about 8 pixels cropped from left, and 8 black at the right), and there's no way to correct this in the OSD or on the PC - changing sync just makes it crop from the right as well.

Deinterlacing

The deinterlacer is pretty good, and does a fine job for what it is. Motion is smooth, details are clear, and it probably runs double rate, at least it feels that way, giving a very good overall experience. Deinterlacing hard detail (such as a Windows desktop or text) isn't that great on moving items such as a dialog box, you'll notice some shimmering.


Dynamic Contrast Control (i.e. backlight modulation)
Is utter rubbish. Doesn't do its job, is buggy, and sometimes breaks down into annoying flicker (which someone else reported earlier). Don't. Just don't.

Photographic Work

The tinting is annoying as you know that your colours will never actually be correct but hopefully that fault will be gone when I eventually get a good panel. Otherwise, everything is perfectly adequate for pro or semi-pro photographic work or image editing.

Software

The software that comes with the monitor includes a manual calibration target, as well as display control software (HP Display Assistant) and random other junk. The display assistant does its job, only if it's the first time you run it after starting up. Exiting and running it again breaks it, as does many other things. It's very buggy. Very.

Panel Blocking/Black Frame Insertion/DLP Rainbow Effect

The monitor uses some kind of partial panel blocking/partial black frame insertion at lower brightness settings..

Some people elsewhere have reported a DLP-like rainbow effect on this monitor, which I can notice too. When moving your gaze quickly, you can sometimes notice the mouse cursor is yellow or flickers - this is because the blue channel is being rapidly toggled on and off. The red channel also seems to be toggled in a similar fashion but to a much lower extent. In the following animated GIF, you'll see what I mean. Pictures were taken in rapid succession on a test image. Left monitor is set at 50% brightness IIRC, right at 100%. Notice how the blue lines become black and white ones become yellow - while the green does not change and red sometimes fades a little.



I'll have to leave it up to other people to suggest why it does this and/or what kind of affect it has on normal use - I've not noticed anything major except the minor "DLP-like" effect.

Finish and Surface

Not too important, but meh. It's matte, but seems to have a slightly stronger matte coating than some others (I'm sure someone mentioned this before) - which might be why it looks a bit less sharp to some people. I've found when trying to take pictures that there's no point between the matte surface (pic below) and the subpixels behind (pic further below) that it I can actually produce a sharp focus - but who knows if it really matters.



The subpixel structure almost makes it look like S-PVA to me...



Anyway. That's all for now... Feel free to ask questions or poke violently if you feel something is wrong with this review.

Not sure if I've forgotten anything. Actually that reminds me of a lovely customer support story: