Dell Ultrasharp U2311H 23" - user experiences?

[mothermachine]

I'm gonna expand upon what I wrote earlier.

The thing I'm not convinced that you understand fully is that there is zero user-perception when it comes to colour on monitors. A monitor is either displaying proper accurate colours or it isn't. Accurate to the original content, the colour profile and to your prints etc. If this stuff didn't matter then colourists/graders in film wouldn't exist for a start. Websites are designed with specific colours, graphic design images/illustrations etc - all the same.

How much of any one or more colours is visible to you on your own screen is down to whether or not it's properly calibrated. Of course you're never going to get absolutely 100% accuracy, as you say, which is expected. But at the very least you should be trying to get your screen(s) to faithfully represent the original content. Again this will all depend on your output preferences (e.g. AdobeRGB1998 or sRGB or whatever profile you work to) but it also applies to Joe Bloggs who doesn't do any DCC work and just wants to make sure that the movie they've just played on their machine looks like the creators intended it to look. Or the game or whatever.

It just makes no sense whatsoever to half-calibrate. Either do it properly or not at all. I really can't see any justification at all for manually fiddling with your screens to make it more "pleasing" when all you are doing is guaranteeing that the output will vary from the original as intended.

 

[PCM2]

It's a bit of eliteism combined with a certain mental attitude, I'm afraid. I have worked with more monitors than I care to remember, designed for a huge range of applications. Let me expand on what I meant when I said 'closed minded'. You have to understand that human perception and what people find pleasing is far more important than an enforced approach that doesn't suit everyone's tastes. Just like people are attracted to different partners, people are attracted to different things in an image. For some, there is solace in knowing that what they are seeing on their screen is 'as the director intended'. For others, they are not bound by such restrictions, and accept that a stunning range of colours that may even extend beyond the original source material is fantastic - as long as the overall image looks good to them!

And if it eases your mind - I am a great fan of the colorimeter, but only within the sRGB OR colour space you intend to work with. I'm sure you're well aware that there is no standardisation in this regard, and this is why I advocate a bit of creative freedom. If everything could be calibrated to a standard of around 120% NTSC then that would be beyond fantastic for entertainment purposes. I really hope that once OLED monitors set the standard that software developers take advantage of the absolutely awe-inspiring range of colours they can output in their content.

 

[mothermachine]

Mate I don't want to get in an argument with you so this will be my last post debating this.

It's not elitism - it's just simple fact and professional experience. There's a reason that HW calibration companies and tools exist, and calibration experts are hired by (I would hope) every single DCC studio in the world, either regularly as outsourced staff or on a permanent basis.

My concern is that I don't want the other people reading this thread to think that it's in any way a good idea to manually calibrate their monitors, because it's not, beyond simply playing with brightness/contrast, which isn't "calibration" anyway. If you don't want to calibrate your screen then fine. If you do, do it properly, and that means using hardware calibration tools.

No calibration = false colours, often/usually terrible.
Manual calibration = better but still false colours = waste of time.
Proper hardware calibration = much more accurate colours and a good starting point.

We're clearly talking about the same thing here, and that is people who are actually concerned with colour. That means anyone who ever edits photos on their computers, makes websites, produces imagery of any kind either for a hobby or professionally. That's a lot of people... Those people will care enough to want to get it right. People who don't care won't ever bother calibrating at all, which is fine.

People reading this thread considering purchasing any decent screen will of course make their own choice as to what they do. But we're talking £50 and about 10 minutes to get things right. Or 20 minutes fiddling and getting it wrong and most likely making it worse. It's a no-brainer really.

On a more serious note - if you're working in a DCC studio of any sort and people there are perfectly happy to manually tweak their monitors to make their work look good in-house with no concern for how the output will look externally (print, web, broadcast monitors or just anybody else's monitors) or how things look from one in-house screen to the next, then that would be troubling in the extreme...

Where we do agree is that we both (and everyone in DCC) hope that one day there might be a fixed standard that will work based on one ICC profile, one monitor type and one print output that all just works. But we're a long way from that, so at the very least the only appropriate approach is to get your starting point as close as possible to total accuracy, and that, once again, means hardware calibration.

I hope that others reading this thread will do some research on this themselves so that their expensive new monitors are actually done proper justice and that they can then feel confident that they're seeing things pretty damned close to how the creators of their content intended. And if they don't care (which is just fine) then I hope they don't waste their time fiddling and meddling which will inevitably make things worse.

Cheers,

 

[dpajur]

Erm, is there such a thing as a calibration tool for around 50 quid?

I had a look but around here they range from 200-700 euro.

 

[mothermachine]

when i said last post in this thread, what i meant was last post arguing about all this

sure, spyder 3 can be had second hand for around £50 or about £70 new. i've tried all the major ones and found that to be the easiest to use and v4 of their software is excellent. v3 was a little "basic" but it's now perfectly usable for any level of user. i'd recommend it myself but others prefer colormonki or eyeone because they're more suited to print as well, but they come at a premium of course.

edit: btw if you get a spyder it can be used to calibrate a whole bunch of stuff, so you can sort out your desktop screen(s) and laptop(s) on the same license, to make sure everything's looking spot on across all your devices. you can probably do this with any of the other major brands too.

one thing - it's basically a requirement to re-calibrate your screen(s) on a regular basis because things change over time. i usually do this once a month. it only takes 10-15 mins. and you must let your screen warm up for a while before you start (an hour is a good safe time) and try not to change your ambient environment too much, otherwise your calibration will have to rely on dynamic changes which is certainly not what you want, or you'll just have to keep re-doing it.

it's nowhere near as complex as it sounds though.

 

[PCM2]

Yeah certainly don't be put off by colorimeters- if you can get ahold of one that's great and most modern colorimeters are simple to use. I haven't been replying to this thread for a bit because it was getting a bit tedious for both of us I think and wasn't too constructive for anybody.

In the meantime I have spoken to a friend of mine from Bristol (scary, I know) who works for a very popular broadcasting coorporation's natural history department. He found the subject of this discussion very interesting but reinforced what I think is some common ground. I can't remember his exact words and probably won't be able to articulate this quite as well as he did. Basically one of his tasks involves manipulating images in both digital format, for use on websites and also assisting in ensuring the printouts in magazines look correct. He shares the frustration in the lack of standardisation and moreover; advancement of the standard. They basically restrict the digital content to the 'lowest common denominator' format (sRGB) so that they know what to expect from the output on a properly sRGB-calibrated device. They have dabbled in wider colour-gamut outputs for both printouts and digital content so that things look closer to 'nature', so to speak, but the slow rate of adoption has made this impractical. He predicts that once OLED monitors become properly mainstream that wider gamuts will become the norm for digital content creation - that will be a good day in my book.

 

[mothermachine]

cool beans

yeh we had a nice lass working for us in a studio a while back (not worked there for a few years) and she was in charge of calibrating everything, from our workstation screens to broadcast monitors to printers etc. she did an amazing job every time and we couldn't have operated without her but the poor thing was tearing her hair out every time it was done because it's such a huge task when you have a full studio of 50+ machines and having to explain to all the artists why it was necessary. i run a very small studio here with 6 machines and 2 screens so it's not too bad at all. i remember some fella coming in to the other (large) studio a while back and trying to convince us to change to another profile and way of working (that frankly wasn't any better in the real world, just on paper) and he got a seriously frosty response from us all haha.

it's the same thing with dynamic contrast on tellys. it's just a fantastic way to ruin a movie and i'm sure filmmakers despise the technology. it's the first thing i turn off when i buy a new telly. unfortunately my current telly refuses to remember my settings, so i have to remember to disable it every time i turn it on for a movie.. meh!

i dunno. maybe 5-10 years down the line it'll all be standardised? one can hope

 

[PCM2]

Urgh dynamic contrast. It's like a plague

 

[mothermachine]

Urgh dynamic contrast. It's like a plague

the worst thing is when you finish watching a movie and you realise that it was enabled the whole time and you therefore were presented with approximately 50% of the content you paid for. haha.

me - "where the f*ck did all my midtones go?!"
samsung telly - "here, have a f*cktonne of blacks and whites and nothing else"
me -

 

[PCM2]

Haha. This reminds me of an image I used in a recent monitor review:

 

[mothermachine]

haha class

 

[Rikki]

The problem you have with calibration is yes, you might have a calibrated screen but that doesnt mean Joe Bloggs does and if you are delivering to the web then other people wont see what you envisaged. The way I calibrate my screens are to load up some images of people and tweak setting until the images look the way I would expect the photos to look in print or how the people look in real life.

 

[Rikki]

Well I love the monitors BUT I hate the dead pixels!

Bought two of these, 2 months apart. Both have dead pixels. Returning the most decent one under DSR though as I cant be bothered with it. Going to order another from a different supplier in the hope its ok.

 

[wozza2k]

Is the U2311 not covered under the dell dead pixel policy like the U2410???

 

[titaniumx3]

Yeah, pretty sure the Dell Ultrasharp range is covered by a zero defective pixel policy.

 

[neoboy]

This seems to be becoming quite a popular unit but we don't have a proper thread for it.

I was in the market for a new monitor last week and after much pondering decided to take the plunge and pay the extra over the usual TN panels I buy. Now I'm really just your Joe Average when it comes to monitors, I know the basics behind the different panel technologies but the talk of sRGB and colour gamuts just goes above my head. As you can get my uses are limited to usual browsing, gaming and in my case also watching HD content on it (my PC has a Blu Ray/HD DVD drive).

Initial impression was good and I know this is subjective but I like the understated professional look of the bezel and no nonsense looking stand which offers just about any adjustment you can think of although disappointingly it's not VESA compliant. In terms of size I really can't say that I miss that 1" at all and the menu was very easy to use and navigate with the buttons on the side. I had a quick check and thankfully there don't appear to be any dead or lazy pixels.

Out of the box the colours seemed a lot more rich and the black colour in particular was impressive, I then used the calibration settings from Flat Panels HD review and they looked even better to me. Also first thing I noticed having used only TN panels before was the excellent viewing angles which will come in handy when I'm watching Blu Rays and such. That point, however, brings me to the one major gripe I have with this monitor and that's the loss of contrast even at small angle changes. It's only really evident to my untrained eye with very dark colours (notably black) and manifests itself in form of purple tint. Maybe this is something that will be sorted in future revisions of this monitors so fingers crossed. The monitor also isn't entirely backlight free but it is quite minor and not noticeable outside of staring obsessively at a black screen.

Now to move onto a point of gaming I really can't say that I've noticed any issues with any input lag or ghosting and feels just as good as my last TN panel did. Also with the better colours games do look rather fantastic, particularly dark scenes. In terms of connectivity it covers all the basics you need including VGA, DVI, 4 USB ports and even a Display Port and only disappointment is HDMI being omitted but I suppose corners had to be cut somewhere since this is one of the first truly affordable IPS panel monitors available to gamers on budget. Overall I'm happy with it, but the contrast change and purple tint that comes with it is very disappointing to me.

P.S. My model was manufacturer in August and is A01 revision although it says on the box that this is a U2311Hb, not sure where the b comes in here?

 

[PCM2]

Well it sounds as if you're overall very happy with the experience you're getting from the U2311H. I completely agree that the responsiveness issues are blown way out of proportion and people look far too much into what a piece of e-paper says when they should be paying more attention to people's experience(s).

I think the contrast shifts you are experiencing are what is known as 'IPS glow'. Blacks on an IPS monitor can have a purple and sometimes silver sheen to them - it's just a limitation of the technology and is to do with the way that light is scattered. For the most part small amounts of black, as I'm sure you'll agree, does generally look quite deep and inky compared to on most TN panels. *VA panels are known to have particularly deep blacks, bright whites and hence superior (often 3000:1) static contrast ratios. They are weaker than IPS monitors in other areas such as colour reproduction and, in particular, responsiveness.

 

[Broken Hope]

Yep the purple tint is the IPS glow, my old 2209wa used to have a silver IPS glow.