HP ZR30w Review
Posted by Jon Peddie on November 25th 2010 | Discuss
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The more you see, the more you can do—a review of HP’s ZR30w
That’s not just resolution, it’s color too
This is another one of those stories that has a sad ending to it. HP loaned us one of their new 30-inch DreamColor displays to play with. They’re not calling it a DreamColor, they prefer the arcane ZR30w moniker—that’s what happens when you let engineers get too close to the marketing department. In truth, this new monitor doesn’t have all the features of a DreamColor, but it’s a wide gamut display that’s going to meet the requirements of many users with professional requirements for color.
The HP ZR30w has an S-IPS panel that supports 4.1 million pixels and 30-bit 1.07 billion displayable colors at 2560 x 1600 resolution, with a 3000:1 dynamic contrast ratio in a 16:10 aspect ratio. It looks amazing.
Unlike its little brother, the LP2480zx, the ZR30w doesn’t come with a calibrator, but you can use the LP2480zx’s calibrator if you happen to have one lying around.
Also, the ZR30w isn’t using LED back-lighting, rather it uses the LCD standard CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) backlighting.
You can drive it with any digital video signal you have: DisplayPort, DVI-D with HDCP support on DisplayPort and DVI-D.
The native color space is wider than sRGB; it covers 102% of the NTSC color gamut which makes it a “wide gamut display.” An sRGB-compliant display would run at around “72% of NTSC (xy).”
The native gamut of the ZR30w almost encloses the Adobe RGB color space (98% coverage (xy)). This means that a user can use this successfully with an Adobe RGB workflow, providing he or she calibrates.
sRGB and Rec709 are completely enclosed, so for most purposes the ZR30w is very capable, but will need calibration to conform. By this I mean using a puck and software to generate an ICC profile. It’s not the same as for the DreamColor display, where the monitor itself is truly calibrated.
The color behavior can’t be changed in-monitor because there’s no scaler. The standard (cost-effective) scalers that are used in monitors do not have the bandwidth to process 2560x1600 pixels 60 times a second and with some exceptions, all 30-inchers in the market live life without scalers. HP’s LP3065 was no exception to this rule.
Hence, no in-monitor color management. But, all graphics cards have scalers.
The ZR30w is for the commercial/professional market and as such is meant for attachment to desktops and workstations where there is always a scaler present.
HP is taking advantage of this by implementing the ZR30w as “direct drive” architecture. That is, the graphics card is close to directly driving the panel.
The advantages of this are:
- Lower price (HP $1299, Dell $1499, same IPS panel).
- Lower power.
- Lower heat output.
- Less parts to break.
But the real proof is in the viewing. The sad part of the story is we have to send it back.
What do we think?
In our dream system we would have three 120Hz 30-inch monitors with 30-bit color—could you hurry it up HP?
We tried to capture the difference one can see between a very good monitor (Dell’s 30-inch) and a HP’s new ZR30w. The ZR30w is much brighter, and sharper. But even with a Canon D5 it’s tough to show the difference and almost impossible with the limitation of printing.
HP has always understood display quality and like Apple puts the extra stuff in displays to make them a notch better. Its subjective maybe, but you can see it almost instantly without coaching. The ZR30w is a prime example. And the good news is it’s competitively priced.
So we think HP has a winner and give the ZR30w a big thumbs up.
