Dell U3011 Ultrasharp 30 inch Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor with Premier Color

Had this a week now.Connectivity 5 stars.Menu system 5stars. Customisation 5 stars.Picture quality 5 stars. The only slight niggle is it is very easy to turn the monitor of by accident. Make sure you use the supplied dual DVI cable to get the highest resolution. If you are in the market for a large monitor this has to be one to consider. You will need plenty of desk real estate to sit it on - it's huge! I am running Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3 and the detail really stands out viewing 21 Megapixel RAW files from my Canon 5D mkII.Out of the box it is preset to 50% Contrast and 50% Brightness and is plenty light enough. Digital photographers will appreciate the preset factory calibrated settings for sRGB and Adobe RGB or you can use your own customised settings.

I'm (amongst other things) a consultant programme manager/director, and I'm often responsible for creating business intelligence teams and greenfield BI organizations. That means I'm the woman responsible for design/speccing the enterprise architecture, which includes the infrastructure, which includes the desktops. I'm also a software developer in my own right.

Business intelligence means very large data models. These are both graphical and text, and typically contain huge amounts of detail. In the past, I've always made a point of dual screens, and the biggest ones I could get my hands on. A decade ago,that meant twin 21 inch CRTs. Today, that means 30 inch 2560*1600.

Four years ago, I bought Dell WFP3007s for all my staff. Their productivity was just excellent, way above the norm. After that, there was another client, same strategy, same results. And so on. Mucho screen = considerably higher productivity.

A couple of months ago, I bought a U3011 just for me! It sits alongside a little 24 inch 1920 * 1200 (NOT 1080p), and the combination is the display on my personal workstation. Goodness, this works a treat. I tend to use the little screen for admin, with Outlook and Firefox open all the time, and the Dell for actual real work. Sometime, I have a manual open on the little screen, rather than an overlapping window on the Dell. The Dell will also tilt into portrait mode and gee, there's *all* my code :-)

If you're a hacker and cut code for a living, you /really/ need one of these. If you're a manager and you want to get more out of your staff, buy them a bunch of these. Your people will love you and your boss will think you're a genius for getting a ton more work from your guys. Much cheaper than giving them a raise, too ;-)

FYI, I drive my U3011 with a vanilla personal computer (quad core/8GB/GeForce 8600 GT) and that works just fine. It's really snappy with no discernable delays. I haven't seen any dead pixels or bad colors or stuff like that. Regarding Dell the company, I dunno . . . I think their ordering systems are dreadful, but the couple of times I've called on after-sales service, it's been absolutely fine. I think they make good kit, and I will for sure buy from them again.

BTW, I recommend the Wacom Intuos4 Large pen/tablet combination as a graphics input device. I have no artistic talent whatsoever, but the combo of the U3011 and the Intuos4 works even for me!

With so many positive reviews across the Web and wanting a 30" 16:10 monitor with both analogue and digital outputs, this latest revision of the 30" 2560x1600 monitors from Dell seemed ideal. It certainly is physically impressive. The build quality seems reasonable, the monitor casing is quite slim, the stand sturdy, there's pretty much every kind of input you could hope for and the OSD/firmware presents lots of options in a clear and easy to use way.

Trouble is, I didn't buy a very expensive 30" monitor to look at its bezel, OSD or input array, I bought it to look at the picture. This is where the U3011 fails. One or two of the more professionally orientated reviews I'd read online mentioned the poor brightness linearity of the screen - it's darker on the left than the right - however, they said it wasn't really visible to the naked eye. It certainly was on my unit, with a clear shading left-right which persisted from cold power-on to fully warm after several hours.

Worse, this was accompanied by a colour shift. It was most obvious when the screen was filled with white, but showed up in photographs too (particularly in clouds) or just general desktop work if lots of light grey windows were present. Again, one or two reviews alluded to this but claimed it wasn't significant. What I saw was a very obvious colour shift - green on the left where it was darker and pink on the right where it was lighter. The effect was made worse by my old monitor sitting to the left of the new one. After calibrating both with an i1 hardware calibrator, the old monitor was neutral and roughly matched the centre of the screen of the Dell - but was in stark contrast with the green tinted left side of the Dell screen.

Upon searching the web for information on green/pink tinges, I found quite a few people complaining about this for both the preceding 3008WFP model and this, the new U3011. If there was an overall linear colour shift, calibration would work around it; but when the screen changes colour from one side to the other, there's nothing you can do.

It could be a manufacturing variation issue, but for a four figure sum on what is priced to be a top-end monitor I don't expect such defects. Amazon's returns department was excellent and accepted it back without any issues at all for a full refund. I've since bought a 30" NEC model in its place - it cost an awful lot, but the quality difference is astounding and really shows up the Dell badly.

The U3011 seems unmatched in terms of its inputs, but it just doesn't cut it for picture quality if you're at all demanding (and at this price you probably should be!). If inputs are your priority then the Dell might be for you; I've given it three stars based on this and the physical form factor (being generous - I can't award half stars, but 2.5 would seem about right).

If picture quality is your main goal though, I strongly recommend you save up for something from NEC or Eizo.

For reference, this is the NEC model I got as a replacement:

NEC MultiSync LCD3090WQXi 30-Inch LCD Monitor

NEC announced a very capable sounding successor to this now quite old model in December, but it's not available for purchase yet. You might want to wait. For me, their new monitor has digital-only inputs while the above model has DVI-I and DVI-D, which is essential as I have old computers I use for testing purposes which have only got analogue video outputs and cannot be upgraded.