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Home >> Photography >> Digital Photography Dell
3007WFP LCD Back in the Cretaceous Age of computing when I bought my first PC way back in 1989, monitor sizes were usually 13 or 14-inches and were decidedly monochrome. I started out with a dinky little 13-inch monochrome CRT for a couple of weeks before returning it in an upgrade to a color CRT and, gasp, EGA graphics capability – yes folks, this was pre-VGA graphics. Back in those days there was one brand that reined supreme for making the best monitors, NEC with their MultiSync CRTs. But, their cost didn’t allow this starving student at the time to indulge in their qualities.
Small 13 and 14-inch monitors eventually gave way to 15-inch monitors and every few years, a larger size would take over as the standard. And so it was in 1995 that when I shelled out big coin again on another PC, I decided to be on the cutting edge by ordering a 17-inch CRT with a whopping 2 MB video card. A few years later the 19-inch CRT became the next size standard and we would normally have expected the 21-inch CRT to have become the next one after that, but shortly after the 19-inch CRTs became the new size standard, LCD panels became cheap enough that most people preferred running a smaller 15-inch LCD than a large and heavy CRT. My workplace is now all LCD-based with most staff using 17-inch LCDs, which resolution wise is the equivalent of the 19-inch CRT (1280x1024 pixels). Looking around the office though and I find many coworkers running their LCDs at a non-native resolution, say 1024x768, which would give me headaches if I had to use my 17-inch LCD at the same quality resolution on an ongoing basis. Our IT staff probably never informed the staff of the higher resolution capabilities of the LCDs and simply swapped out the old CRTs for the LCDs. Meaning that the staff are using the same resolution as was appropriate for their old CRTs. These days 17-inch LCDs are figuratively speaking, a dime a dozen, the equivalent of the 15-inch CRT in their final days of glory. In the older days of LCDs, it didn’t matter whether you had a 17 or 19-inch LCD, because their resolution limits were the same. All that the 19-inch LCD gave you were bigger pixels, not more actual details, with a cost to performance barrier to the next step up, the 20/21-inch LCDs. A few years ago, that cost to performance barrier was finally breached and now these larger LCD panels that offer real improvement in resolution (1600x1200), are available at reasonable cost. However, we are also seeing a new trend emerge that seems to be slowly doing away with the classic 4:3 ratio tube/panel dimension that has been with us since probably the birth of television. We’re now seeing wide aspect panels taking over as the consumers’ choice for their computing needs. Even TV displays are following this trend and I knew that when I bought my classic ratio 32-inch Sony CRT television a few years back, it would be the last time I’d spend any significant money on CRT technology. For the serious photo editor, the 21-inch LCD seemed to be the sweet spot between cost, size and editing quality. Before the Dell became available, I figured on buying a Lacie 321, then the slightly larger 24-inch Eizo ColorEdge CE240W when it became available, but the thought of owning the largest LCD available was always in the back of my mind. Which meant, Apple… Before the Dell 3007, there was only Apple, and it’s not unheard of for PC users to buy Apple Cinema Displays to use in their systems. Something that would probably bring glee to the heart of Steve Jobs, as he would look at it as a wedge into another PC user and to slowly convert that user to the Mac side. With the Dell available, there’s no such potential user turmoil and you save $500 to boot too for what is ostensibly the same basic panel in different cosmetic housing. From what I’ve heard, Phillips is the only manufacturer of these beastly 30-inch panels. I cannot recall now, exactly when I bought my Sony E540 21-inch CRT, but I expected this to be my last CRT, the rationale being that by the time the E540 needed to be replaced, LCD pricing and quality would be much improved so that there would no longer be any concern about doing high-quality photo editing. Well, as it turns out, the old Sony is still going strong, with probably several more years of useful editing work available from it, but after some five-years, it seemed right to move on to an LCD and do away with all the glowing radiation and beastly weight from my desk. Speaking of beastly, when I brought the Sony home, I barely managed to schlep the massive box inside the house by myself. The boxed weight was probably 70-lbs or so, which is normally fine even for this girlie man, but it probably made for a funny sight seeing this little guy grunting under the load up the back stairs to my kitchen. The Dell 3007 conversely is much smaller boxed than expected. I’ve hauled and unpacked largish plasma and LCD TVs before, so I had expected the Dell to be similarly packaged in a largish box. Not so, the Dell 3007 was packed pretty compactly and while I was offered a dolly when I picked it up from the courier’s depot, I just carried it out myself with no danger of straining my back.
Unpacking and setting up is pretty straightforward because the Dell 3007 has a minimum of controls, inputs and outputs. On the front, bottom-right corner is a touch sensitive power on button and right beside that are two touch sensitive + - buttons for controlling the brightness of the screen. On the rear central underside portion of the Dell 3007 is where the IEC power outlet, two USB 2 jacks, and single Dual-DVI connections are found. That’s it for the Dell 3007, a pretty minimalist design. The stand that comes with the Dell 3007 is solid and secure. It has some mighty traction so it does not slip or slide at all on the desktop. The stand also allows the Dell 3007 to be raised up and down, side to side, and tilted back very smoothly for great flexibility to customize how to you like to view the screen in your setup. Firing up the Dell 3007 for the first time was an anxious moment as I watched the computer boot-up. I know my video card is good enough to power the Dell, but will it “really” be good enough? No fears warranted at all, as after boot-up, I adjusted the video resolution to the Dell’s native resolution of 2560x1600 pixels. Doing a glance over of the entire screen, there were no dead pixels and no bleeding of the blacklight at the edges of the panel, as there is with my Samsung LCD. After letting it up warm up appropriately, I profiled the Dell 3007 with the Monaco Optix XR and EZColor software. The only adjustment being possible is just the backlighting of the panel, so that and profiling to the Dell’s native white balance was all that I did. After profiling, I compared it to my appropriately warmed up Sony CRT. The result is a very close match between the LCD and CRT. Looking critically, the Dell 3007 seems to have a little more “burnish” to its presentation. There’s obviously greater contrast, which is typical when comparing LCDs to CRTs, but there also seemed to be a touch more warmth from the big Dell. Looking deep into the shadows revealed the CRT to still be superior with the Dell blocking up to featureless black while the CRT still showed detailed deeper in. However, I’d keep in mind that this difference is subtle and not likely to be one that would actually reveal itself on a print. With the contrast and overall glow from the Dell, this is definitely an LCD that will require the use of Photoshop’s soft proofing feature to get a more accurate sense of what a print will look like. With the CRT, I never had to bother with soft proofing because what I saw on the monitor is what I got on print under filtered daylight conditions in my home office. I suppose that makes some of you wonder, why bother to spend big money on a new LCD if what I had was already so good? Good question and I can only respond with…hubris.
Jones Syndrome Way back in the early 1990s, when I was in university, some of my friends and me were engaged in a little arms race related to paintball. Back then paintball guns were mostly pump action designs, but a major change would soon be underway when Tippman and Benjamin Sheridan produced the first semi-automatic guns. A
couple of my friends bought the Tippmans and I couldn’t bare the thought of them one-upping me. If pump
action pistols were like regional range missiles, semi autos were
like ICBMs, capable of completely changing how paintball battles
would be fought and won. I ended up buying the
Another friend not caught up in the arms dealings that went on in my crowd remarked that we all suffered from Jones syndrome, otherwise known as “keeping up with the Jones.” Today, we just refer to it as “Jonesing” when we feel envy and desire to keep up with others. Fast forward to current and when a California-based photographer friend sent me an email to advise me that he had just ordered a 30-inch Dell LCD, well, let’s just say that Jones got the better of me and about a week later, I ordered my own. Yes, I am a weak fool. However, while I would state that the friend making the purchase was what caused the gun to fire, the trigger had been cocked for almost a year leading to the actual purchase. The 30-inch Dell joined the same sized Apple Cinema Display (ACD) at the beginning of 2006, as the largest consumer LCD computer monitor available. To date, I do not know of any other mainstream brand producing a 30-inch beast of an LCD monitor. Seeing a 30-inch ACD in real life was a revelation when Apple made it available in 2005 and it generated instant desire and lust, but severely tempered by its introductory CAN $4000 price tag. The price of the ACD was bad enough, but this monster, along with the Dell version, requires significant video card power to juice it properly. Back then, there were only a few cards available to drive the WQXGA resolution of 2560x1600 pixels, and these exulted, select few video cards were priced higher than what most consumers would spend on an entire computer system, monitor and printer included. I knew instantly that buying a 30-inch LCD was not just a $4000 purchase, but one that would be over $6000 when everything was said and done with the taxes. $6000 for a monitor is hefty for even addicted spendaholics like me. Slowly though, the price on that big, sexy ACD began to fall and by the time the Dell version came out, the ACD seemed within mortal reach. However, the Dell came out even cheaper and the Canadian price was initially $2300. By then, more video cards were available for cheaper that could power the high-resolution displays so that what was once an unreachable $6000, was halved in less than a year to $3000 for monitor and video card. Now at the end of 2006, the Dell’s price has fallen further to $1800 while the ACD still maintains the traditional Apple premium by being $500 more at $2300. The other factor that pushed me over the edge was also the receipt of a “new” old computer in the form of a HP XW6200 workstation and its nVidia Quadro FX3400 video card. Update - by the time I finished writing this review, the price of the Dell 3007 has now fallen to CAN $1550! The FX3400 has a dual-DVI connection required for proper use of the Dell and it can drive the high resolution output. Without the HP XW6200, buying the Dell would likely have been at least another half-year or more down the road when I had planned to upgrade the computer to a quad-core box (with the HP in-house, I'm not sure when the next computer upgrade will actually occur). Alternatives As big as the Dell 3007 is, it still isn’t actually big enough for me to see an image at the magnification that I prefer to edit at and have all of my used palettes viewable. I still need to use my old 17-inch Samsung to hold those extra palettes. If you require lots of lateral space and not as much vertical space, running two 20-inch LCDs will offer you more lateral resolution split into two screens (3200x1200 versus 2560x1600). This is not only significantly cheaper, but also saves you the headache of having to have a smoking video card to drive the big Dell. Truly anal retentive color specialists may prefer the very highly regarded, but even more expensive Eizo LCDs instead. We may also be in the last days of current LCD technology with LED lighting becoming more affordable. As I write this in early December, Samsung will soon be shipping a LED-based LCD (SyncMaster XL20) that can display Adobe RGB gamut for US $2000. This is right in the range of what I had budgeted for my monitor upgrade and I wonder if the decision might have changed if I had known about it before ordering the Dell.
Everyday Use After getting to use and appreciate the expansive screen real estate, you can’t go back to what you had before and using the Dell on a day-to-day basis is a revelation for productivity in being able to see so much at once. Browser
applications like
There have been some studies that indicate that providing employees with dual-monitors improves productivity because of the ability to have multiple windows and applications running and showing at the same time. I think the same can be said of having one very large monitor to improve productivity, but as I mentioned earlier, as big as the 30-inch Dell and Apple LCDs are, they still cannot show as much lateral information as two smaller LCDs placed side-by-side. Using the 17-inch LCD beside the Dell is still a must to show all the palettes that I like to use in Photoshop, Nikon Capture, and Bibble. I’m even considering getting a cheap 21-inch LCD running 1600x1200 resolution and then flipping it vertically to match the 1600 vertical resolution of the Dell. But, all in good time, as there’s no rush to spend more money on more LCDs at the moment and besides which, given how quickly the price of the 3007 is falling, I'd have to give some serious thought to just buying another one and running dual 30-inch LCDs.
Conclusion I don’t think I can be very objective this soon into the use and ownership of the Dell 3007 LCD. Of course I like it and I’m not just saying that because I blew $2000 on it – the trend in a lot of Internet reviews is that if the reviewer spent his/her own money buying it, somehow, the reviewer will find a way to like it and justify the expense, even if the product itself really ain’t that great. With my limited experience in using LCDs, I cannot tell you that the Dell 3007 is a champion of color accuracy and that it will satisfy the very color critical. My objective thinking is that the Dell will not match, say an expensive Eizo or the now discontinued Sony Artisan CRT, but given how close it is to my previous reference, the Sony E540 CRT, I’m quite satisfied with the Dell’s performance. It’s certainly not a cheap purchase and for the money, I would give some serious thought to whether or not you really need the real estate provided and can live with a smaller and potentially superior LCD in the form of the Lacie 321, the Eizo CE240W, or, if you like being on the cutting edge, the LED-based Samsung XL20. However, if you do need the screen real estate, the only thing I can think of that would better than a Dell 3007, would be two Dell 3007 LCDs running side-by-side J |
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