Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I bought this monitor to replace my worn out CRT monitors, used mostly for high quality adjustment and soft proofing of photographs. I wanted something in the 23-26 inch range, I wanted an IPS panel (as compared to inferior TN type monitors)and I really didn't want to pay $1300 for the NEC 2690 WUXI, $900 for the new Apple LED 24" or even more for higher end displays. The HP seemed to fit the bill at about $600, it had generally good reviews from photo web sites, but there were a few people reporting color shifts across the monitor.
It is not possible to examine these high end monitors in person where I live (amazingly, what with being a few miles from Silicon Valley), so I ordered it on the strength of the reviews, the many color and picture controls it offers and the wide range of types of connections it will accept. And the hope that the reported color gradient was not a consistent problem, just some QA outlier.
It is a nice monitor, it calibrated very well with my Spyder 3 Pro calibrator, but it does have an obvious green to pink color shift going from left to right, just as had been reported. This seems to be a design defect with this monitor. Not terrible, I might not have noticed it immediately if I was not looking for it, but it is there, no such thing on my Apple 23" at work or even the TN panel on my Mac laptop. I think the shift is more obvious once the brightness is tuned down to levels consistent with photographic proofing, but I can not say for sure, as I really haven't evaluated this.
I thought of returning it, had I bought it locally from Best Buy or such I would have returned it, but the energy barrier to sending it back to Amazon was just too high. So I will live with it, the color is very good in the middle 2/3 of the screens, I will not expect critical color accuracy on the ends of the screen. For most people who take pictures, this will probably not be a problem most of the time. But for people who take color management very seriously, this is likely not the best choice. Alternatives will cost you, however.
It has picture in picture capability, which I thought would be a nice thing to play with, but it turns out that it will not do the PIP thing with two inputs from my two computers, only when one input is from video-type sources via component or similar connectors. A minor disappointment. It does switch between sources quite nicely, so I hook up both computers and can easily view either one. Lots of other connectors that I will probably not use, but it does add flexibility that monitors such as the Apple just don't offer.
Build quality is high, the base is very nice indeed, the USB hub is nice, but sometimes it doesn't work with the laptop due to "inadequate electrical power". The placement of the input ports, tucked up into the bottom, is very poor, making it extremely difficult to plug in new connectors--one of those extremely obvious design flaws that leave you asking just what the designers were thinking.
I see some other reviews that comment about excessive saturation in the monitor. This is a wide gamut monitor, very different from most other LCDs, and you should really not buy one of these if you are not prepared to calibrate the monitor and use software that understands embedded "color ICC/ICM profiles", such as Photoshop >5 and Firefox >3 (have to turn this feature on). Even then, unprofiled images from the web or elsewhere can appear very overly saturated. If none of this rings a bell, you should probably not buy this, or any, wide gamut monitor if you want color accuracy.
April update--the problem is getting worse, it might be temperature related, it is time to cut my losses and move on. The new Apple LED monitors are gorgeous, another motivation to put this flawed monitor behind me.
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