Soldato
The Hazro HZ30Wi is a 30" IPS, 2560*1600 resolution screen. It's priced a little lower than other 30" monitors, and I know that a few of you are interested in exactly what you sacrifice in order to get a 30" screen at a reduced price.
As some of you may know, I recently received two of these screens; one as a replacement for an old model HZ30W that failed a few months back, and another that I bought for £675 through Hazro's introductory special offer. So, having put them through their paces, here are my thoughts. You'll notice that I constantly compare the screen to the HP ZR30W... The main reason for this is that I actually have one of these to compare it with (you can see my comments on that screen here), but since the ZR30W is probably the most direct competitor to the Hazro, I think that it's a fair comparison to make. For the record, the Hazro is only available from OcUK, selling for £800. The ZR30W can be found for a little over £1000.
Looks and build quality:
I have to say, the Hazro screen looks very slick... It certainly doesn't have a "budget" appearance. The casing is made entirely of black aluminium, and the bezels are really quite thin. At 18mm they are thinner than the HP (24mm), and on a such a large screen the effect of the thin bezels is quite appealing. The stand that Hazro provide is also highly adjustable, allowing the screen to be raised to quite a height - enough that it can be rotated into portrait mode. I'm not aware of any other 30" screens that have this capability, so that's really quite a nice feature to see, although personally I much prefer landscape mode. The stand itself is fairly sturdy, though not as solid as the one on the HP. There's no danger of it toppling over or anything, but it will wobble a little if I rock the desk. This is most likely due to the screen's ability to rotate, so it's hard to be too critical, since other 30" screens simply don't offer the flexibility to rotate at all.
The two screens that I received both arrived with zero dead pixels. Of course a sample of two is not sufficient to draw any firm conclusions about pixel defects, but it's certainly a very promising start, especially when you consider that each screen has twice the number of pixels as 1080p. I have to say, I was kind of expecting a few dead pixels, if for no other reason than that Hazro's dead pixel policy is really quite lax (see here), offering replacement only for >9 full pixel defects or >21 sub-pixel defects. On the strength of what I've seen with these two screens, Hazro could consider tightening up this policy somewhat... This would undoubtedly give more confidence to prospective buyers. In comparison, both Dell and HP offer a zero sub-pixel defect guarantee for their 30" screens, with door-to-door replacement. Since the Hazro is £200/£400 cheaper than the HP/Dell it's perhaps unreasonable to expect the same service, but it would be nice to see it tightened up to more reasonable levels. I can't imagine anyone being happy with 20 pixel defects after spending £800!
I checked each screen carefully for backlight bleed, in a darkened room using a black background, and I couldn't find any. Similarly the backlight uniformity was very good - to my naked eye there was no noticable shift in brightness from the centre of the screen to the edges.
Overall I find it hard to fault the Hazro for build quality, and I think that the design is really quite sleek (matter of taste though I suppose!). My only (very minor) criticism would be that putting the on-off switch and brightness controls on the side of the screen makes it hard to use in a multi-screen setup!
Image quality:
First up the lag and responsiveness: In gaming I could not detect any input lag (and I'm generally pretty sensitive to this), but given that TFT central measured the input lag at 14ms, this is to be expected. Similarly I could not detect any ghosting, or other responsiveness issues. In this regard the Hazro and the HP both come off very well, making either of them particularly suitable for fast-paced gaming.
Now for the all-important picture quality: I've had the two Hazros next to the HP since I set them up, and having tried a range of different images, videos and games, a few things have become clear. First, the colours on the Hazro are really quite good... The Hazro screens are balanced more towards the red end of the spectrum, whereas the HP is balanced more towards blue, but images on both screens stand out really quite well. Honestly, I was expecting the colours on the Hazro to be noticably worse than on the HP, given that it's based on an older panel, but there really isn't too much difference overall. On both screens the colours are vivid, and seem to "pop out" nicely in games and in films. For colour-critical work you will of course want to do some software calibration in your individual lighting conditions. One obvious difference between the HP and Hazro though is that the backlights on the HP warm up more quickly. For the first minute or so in Windows the HP looks quite a lot better, but once the backlight has stabilised on the Hazros there isn't too much between them (other than the red vs blue balance).
Running the Lagom image quality tests, in most cases there is not too much difference between the HP and Hazro, with one major exception: In the black-level tests the HP comes out a lot better. With the Hazro, the first visible box is number 6 at minimum brightness, and number 7 at full brightness. With the HP, ALL boxes are visible at any brightness. Comparing the two screens in dark games (Doom3, left4dead) you can definitely see a little more dark-end detail with the HP, although upping the in-game gamma slightly seems to improve things on the Hazro. Still, based on my past experience, being able to see box 6 or 7 in the black level test is not too bad.
Viewing angles are very good, as you would naturally expect from an IPS panel. Unlike the old-version Hazro I owned previously, there is no "wave" effect when viewing uniform colours. I will mention though that the whites on the HP seem a little 'cleaner' when the screens are side by side. When only using the Hazro they seem perfectly white, but when spanning a white window over both screens, the HP does seem to be a little "whiter". This could just be due to the HP being more heavily weighted towards the blue-end of the spectrum, but who knows.
General comments:
As with any 30" 2560*1600 screen, it gives you acres of desktop space which can really come in handy. Games look great, although bare in mind that you will need to have a decent graphics card to drive demanding games at this resolution (98% more pixels than a 1080p screen). The step up in physical size from a 24" 16:9 screen is also pretty significant (see here). At £800 it's still expensive, but it's still a good chunk of change cheaper than competing 30" screens.
Do bare in mind though that, just like the HP ZR30W, it does not have an internal scaler. If you're using it as a PC monitor you will probably never notice this, since everything is handled seamlessly automatically by your video card, and if you want to you can force 1:1 pixel mapping or 'stretching' in your video card control panel. But, if you're thinking of plugging in a PS3, x-box or blu-ray player then you won't have the same kind of control that you would with a screen like the Dell U3011. The Dell is more suitable as an all-round entertainment centre, whereas the Hazro and the HP are pure-and-simple PC monitors.
Overall:
I have to say I have been pleasantly surprised with the Hazro. The build quality is good, it looks quite sleek, and the stand gives you plenty of flexibility. In terms of image quality, it's not too far off its more-expensive cousin, the HP ZR30W (which uses the same panel as the Dell U3011). It falls behind the HP a little in terms of distinguishing blacks at the darkest levels, but apart from that there isn't too much in it.
If you're thinking of going for a 30" screen but the price is putting you off, the Hazro HZ30Wi is certainly well worth considering
As some of you may know, I recently received two of these screens; one as a replacement for an old model HZ30W that failed a few months back, and another that I bought for £675 through Hazro's introductory special offer. So, having put them through their paces, here are my thoughts. You'll notice that I constantly compare the screen to the HP ZR30W... The main reason for this is that I actually have one of these to compare it with (you can see my comments on that screen here), but since the ZR30W is probably the most direct competitor to the Hazro, I think that it's a fair comparison to make. For the record, the Hazro is only available from OcUK, selling for £800. The ZR30W can be found for a little over £1000.
Looks and build quality:
I have to say, the Hazro screen looks very slick... It certainly doesn't have a "budget" appearance. The casing is made entirely of black aluminium, and the bezels are really quite thin. At 18mm they are thinner than the HP (24mm), and on a such a large screen the effect of the thin bezels is quite appealing. The stand that Hazro provide is also highly adjustable, allowing the screen to be raised to quite a height - enough that it can be rotated into portrait mode. I'm not aware of any other 30" screens that have this capability, so that's really quite a nice feature to see, although personally I much prefer landscape mode. The stand itself is fairly sturdy, though not as solid as the one on the HP. There's no danger of it toppling over or anything, but it will wobble a little if I rock the desk. This is most likely due to the screen's ability to rotate, so it's hard to be too critical, since other 30" screens simply don't offer the flexibility to rotate at all.
The two screens that I received both arrived with zero dead pixels. Of course a sample of two is not sufficient to draw any firm conclusions about pixel defects, but it's certainly a very promising start, especially when you consider that each screen has twice the number of pixels as 1080p. I have to say, I was kind of expecting a few dead pixels, if for no other reason than that Hazro's dead pixel policy is really quite lax (see here), offering replacement only for >9 full pixel defects or >21 sub-pixel defects. On the strength of what I've seen with these two screens, Hazro could consider tightening up this policy somewhat... This would undoubtedly give more confidence to prospective buyers. In comparison, both Dell and HP offer a zero sub-pixel defect guarantee for their 30" screens, with door-to-door replacement. Since the Hazro is £200/£400 cheaper than the HP/Dell it's perhaps unreasonable to expect the same service, but it would be nice to see it tightened up to more reasonable levels. I can't imagine anyone being happy with 20 pixel defects after spending £800!
I checked each screen carefully for backlight bleed, in a darkened room using a black background, and I couldn't find any. Similarly the backlight uniformity was very good - to my naked eye there was no noticable shift in brightness from the centre of the screen to the edges.
Overall I find it hard to fault the Hazro for build quality, and I think that the design is really quite sleek (matter of taste though I suppose!). My only (very minor) criticism would be that putting the on-off switch and brightness controls on the side of the screen makes it hard to use in a multi-screen setup!
Image quality:
First up the lag and responsiveness: In gaming I could not detect any input lag (and I'm generally pretty sensitive to this), but given that TFT central measured the input lag at 14ms, this is to be expected. Similarly I could not detect any ghosting, or other responsiveness issues. In this regard the Hazro and the HP both come off very well, making either of them particularly suitable for fast-paced gaming.
Now for the all-important picture quality: I've had the two Hazros next to the HP since I set them up, and having tried a range of different images, videos and games, a few things have become clear. First, the colours on the Hazro are really quite good... The Hazro screens are balanced more towards the red end of the spectrum, whereas the HP is balanced more towards blue, but images on both screens stand out really quite well. Honestly, I was expecting the colours on the Hazro to be noticably worse than on the HP, given that it's based on an older panel, but there really isn't too much difference overall. On both screens the colours are vivid, and seem to "pop out" nicely in games and in films. For colour-critical work you will of course want to do some software calibration in your individual lighting conditions. One obvious difference between the HP and Hazro though is that the backlights on the HP warm up more quickly. For the first minute or so in Windows the HP looks quite a lot better, but once the backlight has stabilised on the Hazros there isn't too much between them (other than the red vs blue balance).
Running the Lagom image quality tests, in most cases there is not too much difference between the HP and Hazro, with one major exception: In the black-level tests the HP comes out a lot better. With the Hazro, the first visible box is number 6 at minimum brightness, and number 7 at full brightness. With the HP, ALL boxes are visible at any brightness. Comparing the two screens in dark games (Doom3, left4dead) you can definitely see a little more dark-end detail with the HP, although upping the in-game gamma slightly seems to improve things on the Hazro. Still, based on my past experience, being able to see box 6 or 7 in the black level test is not too bad.
Viewing angles are very good, as you would naturally expect from an IPS panel. Unlike the old-version Hazro I owned previously, there is no "wave" effect when viewing uniform colours. I will mention though that the whites on the HP seem a little 'cleaner' when the screens are side by side. When only using the Hazro they seem perfectly white, but when spanning a white window over both screens, the HP does seem to be a little "whiter". This could just be due to the HP being more heavily weighted towards the blue-end of the spectrum, but who knows.
General comments:
As with any 30" 2560*1600 screen, it gives you acres of desktop space which can really come in handy. Games look great, although bare in mind that you will need to have a decent graphics card to drive demanding games at this resolution (98% more pixels than a 1080p screen). The step up in physical size from a 24" 16:9 screen is also pretty significant (see here). At £800 it's still expensive, but it's still a good chunk of change cheaper than competing 30" screens.
Do bare in mind though that, just like the HP ZR30W, it does not have an internal scaler. If you're using it as a PC monitor you will probably never notice this, since everything is handled seamlessly automatically by your video card, and if you want to you can force 1:1 pixel mapping or 'stretching' in your video card control panel. But, if you're thinking of plugging in a PS3, x-box or blu-ray player then you won't have the same kind of control that you would with a screen like the Dell U3011. The Dell is more suitable as an all-round entertainment centre, whereas the Hazro and the HP are pure-and-simple PC monitors.
Overall:
I have to say I have been pleasantly surprised with the Hazro. The build quality is good, it looks quite sleek, and the stand gives you plenty of flexibility. In terms of image quality, it's not too far off its more-expensive cousin, the HP ZR30W (which uses the same panel as the Dell U3011). It falls behind the HP a little in terms of distinguishing blacks at the darkest levels, but apart from that there isn't too much in it.
If you're thinking of going for a 30" screen but the price is putting you off, the Hazro HZ30Wi is certainly well worth considering
Last edited:
i've found the HP for £976 too....