HP LP2475w, IPS 24" Official Thread! (Now Available from OcUK)

ecat · 20 Nov 2008 at 07:31

cataferal said:
I think this is partly to do with the way we've taken all the benefits of CRT technology for granted, such as the great viewing angles, response time, and black levels (just to name a few). It can be hard to adapt if you've used these monitors for the last few decades, as a great many of us have.

Quoted for Truth (the abbreviation *** is censured !?)

As a CRT replacement this is the best monitor I've found, at its price point at least and I'm not willing to spend more.

I've just revisited the colour variation in response to a thread on a different forum, I'll repeat my findings here for any who are interested...

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It may sound alarming but 20% variation in brightness would appear to be average to good for current LCD's, see Panel Uniformity :
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/hazro_hz26wi.htm
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/samsung_245t.htm
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/dell_2408wfp.htm

... not a comprehensive list of models I know but hopefully representative (?).

The 500k colour temperature variation while far from ideal may also be par for the course for this monitor. I measured my July 08 (iirc) screen about 6 weeks ago at 64xxk left side, 68xxk right side. Subjectively this has improved over time.

Subjectively, humm. Ok, I've been putting this off but in the interests of science I'll do a quick measurement. I've been messing around so I'm at about 5800k at the moment: Custom Colour, i1d2 + basICColor 4.1 as before, gives 57xxk left side and 59xxk right side.

I'm surprised, honestly. Alarm bells always ring when I'm told 'things improve with time', but hats off to PhillJohn and his contacts. If this result holds up at 6500k then at 400 hours usage this is a real, measurable, improvement. While I still consider shipping a panel with 500k variation a mistake on HPs part I must confess I'm very pleased at this result. Of course, ymmv, your eyes certainly do.

I've no idea if the above is of any help to anyone. I kept this monitor because, even with the colour variation, it was the best all rounder I could find at the price. Due to black levels and contrast ratios I still consider it inferior to a good CRT, but as far as the great LCD compromise goes this is one screen I can live with.

Update:
I've just tested at D65 and I do still have a 400k + variation between left and right sides, looks like things have not improved over time. Repeating the test at 5800k gives the same results as above, 200k variation. Interesting.

So, running at a warmer colour temperature entails reducing the contribution from the blue component and hence reduces the variation on my panel which exhibits a blue variance going from left to right. While not 'correct' it makes sense.

I'll settle for this, for now. I'll contact HP if / when I hear the issue has been resolved. I adhere to neither the recommended screen brightness settings nor the recommended ambient illumination levels so been able to hit D65 is a moot point.

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HighlandeR · 20 Nov 2008 at 22:02

Seriously just considering a TN panel for now cheap and cheeful, maybe in 6 months time we will have backlit TN panels that own all these MVA/IPS panels even for half the cost

ecat · 21 Nov 2008 at 00:03

<chuckle> I wouldn't hold my breath. The market appears to be heading for wider, shorter and cheaper, better is on the back burner for now. But what do I know ?

You have the right idea, get something you can live with, preferably with a 3 to 5 year guarantee or cheap enough that you can replace it without to much pain. This was my idea at least and despite all you may read in this thread I'm very happy with my little HP, more than that, I'm actually quite fond of it and enjoy using it. I shudder when I think back to the 24" value and the dell, experiences I don't want to repeat.

3 to 5 years. In my dreams I see fed, sed, ted, ned whatever you want to call it arriving 2009 and tumbling in price by 2011. Mind you in my dreams I also see Gwen Stefani tumbling in... Time for bed

Bazza · 22 Nov 2008 at 12:09

martian_aphid said:
I'm still having a coupe of issues with this monitor and I'm just wondering whether you guys advise me to ask for a replacement or it's something that I can resolve myself.

The first is when waking the monitor after it has gone to sleep, firstly this seems to take an unusually long time. My last lcds woke almost immediately however the hp takes about 5-10 seconds to wake, then the image will flash on and off serveral times, sometimes just 2-3 times others up to 10. I've uploaded a video showing an example of my problem. The video demonstrates the response time of the monitor, at the beginning of the video I moved the mouse and it took approx 10seconds for the monitor to respond, at which point you can see that the image flickers on and off 4 times on this occassion.

Oh my God somebody else with this problem. Have you solved this yet? I have exactly the same problem and it's doing my head in. When the screen does eventually return the sidebar (Vistax64) is often corrupt and even reloading it doesn't help. I'm starting to think it's an ATI driver/GPU problem although my Dell 2005fpw monitor worked fine with these drivers. I'm running a Sapphire HD4850X2 card with the latest 8.11 drivers.

I have to say apart from this niggle I absolutely love this monitor.

Fat Dog · 22 Nov 2008 at 13:21

Bazza said:
Oh my God somebody else with this problem. Have you solved this yet? I have exactly the same problem and it's doing my head in. When the screen does eventually return the sidebar (Vistax64) is often corrupt and even reloading it doesn't help. I'm starting to think it's an ATI driver/GPU problem although my Dell 2005fpw monitor worked fine with these drivers. I'm running a Sapphire HD4850X2 card with the latest 8.11 drivers.

I have to say apart from this niggle I absolutely love this monitor.

It is an ATI driver issue mate. I got rid of my ATI card for this reason and with an nvidia driver the monitor is perfect.

Bazza · 22 Nov 2008 at 13:53

Fat Dog said:
It is an ATI driver issue mate. I got rid of my ATI card for this reason and with an nvidia driver the monitor is perfect.

It's what I feared most to be honest. A graphics card costing close to £400 is causing me so many problems. I've just had to reset the PC as it refused to bring the monitor out of standby and just flashed on and off for minutes.

deckard242 · 27 Nov 2008 at 23:33

Hello, I`m newbie in this forum, but as new owner of lp 2475w I`d like to share my experience with regards to the already discussed issue with backlight uniformity. The first panel I bought had that purplish gradient from left to right, i.e. left side of monitor appearing cooler (greenish) and the right side being a bit warmer (purplish). I was quite disappointed cause once I spotted it (thanks to reading user`s comments on tech forums...

I couldn`t get it out of my mind... It was quite noticeable during fullscreen internet browsing and basically in any text-based applications with white background.
As the customer protection is pretty good in our country and you can return any poduct (when ordered via internet) to the seller without any reason within 14 days from purchase I decided to buy another model from the same supplier (I got it actually just two days later than the first one) while hoping that this issue may vary from piece to piece. I think that someone posted there that he didn`t belive that and that probably all panels will suffer from that backlight issue.

What I can say is that I had a chance to have two pieces of this panel in dual mode and even after two hours of testing on white background I couldn`t notice any backlight gradient on the second panel. The second one has pretty uniform backlight accross whole area without any noticeable gradinent or shade (except very slightly darker corners, but was same for both panels) so I`m taking this one and return the other one to the seller.

Therefore if you have either luck or chance to first try-then choose, you can get decent panel without the backlight gradient issue.

Otherwise I`m pretty satisfied with this S-IPS model apart from a bit more vivid red/green, but I think it`ll just take few weeks to get used to that wide gamut.

btw. The second panel one had a bit inflexed stand so I couldn`t get the panel straight (right corner was cca 1cm bellow the x-axis) therefore I decided to switch the stands (and it helped) before returning the first panel, so watch out for that! I already spotted it someone else complaining about...

Greetings everyone!

deckard242 · 27 Nov 2008 at 23:52

bigNeil · 28 Nov 2008 at 16:43

I got a replacement monitor today, just set up. Seems to be much better in terms of green/pink (ok, slightly noticeable if you look very closely) so I am happy. My original one definitely got better with almost 30 days use out of it, but decided not to take the risk and one tech guy I spoke to was in agreement that swapping was best.

The techie said he has personally dealt with 'about a dozen' returns for this model (whereas the other guy I spoke with had no knowledge if the issue), and most were happy with their replacements. He confirmed that they were working on correlating the serial numbers on affected units, but no definite colclusions yet.

omnipheasant · 5 Dec 2008 at 13:49

Greetings everyone. This thread and one at arstechnica led me to buy a 2475. Has anyone set up one of them with an Ergotron arm yet? According to the Ergotron website, this monitor's a bit too heavy.

philjohn · 5 Dec 2008 at 14:15

omnipheasant said:
Greetings everyone. This thread and one at arstechnica led me to buy a 2475. Has anyone set up one of them with an Ergotron arm yet? According to the Ergotron website, this monitor's a bit too heavy.

If ergotron say it's too heavy it definitely will be, MRK had the same problem with the Hazro (it was just at the limit, but when attached was too heavy). Apparently they are releasing a new mount soon (this month or next) that can take panels up to 15kg.

omnipheasant · 5 Dec 2008 at 14:36

Thanks for that. I also sent an email to Ergotron. If they have any specifics, I'll report back.

philameena · 6 Dec 2008 at 09:47

Hi all.
Looking for advice really.

Been after a decent 22/24" for over a year now. Tried 3, all TN screens, all returned as I couldn't live with the colour/brightness shift when even slightly moving my head away from centre. So for the past few months I've been on the lookout for a not-TO-expensive PVA or IPS screen.

Use mainly for browsing and gaming.. with a bit of photo work.

So, thought I'd finally found my goal with the Dell 2408WFP but then all the reports re terrible input lag put me off.

So now I truely thought I'd hit the jackpot with the L2475W. Except now I'm reading about the colour saturation issues and the red/green tint left to right.

I haven't got a calibration device and won't be getting one. So what are the realistic chances of being able to calibrate out the extreme reds without one?

Should I get a L2475W or keep waiting for a better screen??

Bazza · 6 Dec 2008 at 11:45

Bazza said:
Oh my God somebody else with this problem. Have you solved this yet? I have exactly the same problem and it's doing my head in. When the screen does eventually return the sidebar (Vistax64) is often corrupt and even reloading it doesn't help. I'm starting to think it's an ATI driver/GPU problem although my Dell 2005fpw monitor worked fine with these drivers. I'm running a Sapphire HD4850X2 card with the latest 8.11 drivers.

I have to say apart from this niggle I absolutely love this monitor.

Further to this, I used Acronis Home Image to restore a backup of XP and the problem disappears completely. One move of the mouse and the display comes back instantly. To be safe I reformatted the drive, installed Vista x64 from scratch and apart from the system drivers I only installed the ATI 8.11 ones and the problem is back. So it's a Vista x64/ATI driver problem for sure. Pity as this is the only real problem I have with Vista and I don't want to go back to XP.

philjohn · 6 Dec 2008 at 12:10

philameena said:
Hi all.
Looking for advice really.

Been after a decent 22/24" for over a year now. Tried 3, all TN screens, all returned as I couldn't live with the colour/brightness shift when even slightly moving my head away from centre. So for the past few months I've been on the lookout for a not-TO-expensive PVA or IPS screen.

Use mainly for browsing and gaming.. with a bit of photo work.

So, thought I'd finally found my goal with the Dell 2408WFP but then all the reports re terrible input lag put me off.

So now I truely thought I'd hit the jackpot with the L2475W. Except now I'm reading about the colour saturation issues and the red/green tint left to right.

I haven't got a calibration device and won't be getting one. So what are the realistic chances of being able to calibrate out the extreme reds without one?

Should I get a L2475W or keep waiting for a better screen??

I still haven't got around to buying a calibrator and have no problems with one of the posted profiles/RGB settings. You totally get used to the saturation after a few days and unless you are doing colour critical work it's not really a problem.

Left to right problem irons itself out after prolonged usage (100+ hours), but if you get a really bad one just keep RMA'ing them until you get a decent one.

For the money I believe it's the best monitor around in its class, until Hazro release a model with an adjustable backlight control.

HighlandeR · 7 Dec 2008 at 00:06

Lets hope Hazro release the the new panel Feb

philjohn · 7 Dec 2008 at 11:15

HighlandeR said:
Lets hope Hazro release the the new panel Feb

You are still beholden to LG.Display's apparent lack of quality control currently. Even the NEC 30" monitors seem to get very bad reviews when it comes to uniformity and quality.

TheInVisibleGoD · 7 Dec 2008 at 23:27

I've already received my HP too but...
Is it normal that in the OSD monitor info shows, right after I switched on for the first time, a 6h of use already!? :confused:

I've found also the text issue and "playing" with cleartype values (from powertoys) didn't solve the problem at all. Very disappointing at this aspect!

Oh... and it came with one dead pixel too...

philjohn · 8 Dec 2008 at 11:22

TheInVisibleGoD said:
I've already received my HP too but...
Is it normal that in the OSD monitor info shows, right after I switched on for the first time, a 6h of use already!?

That's a bit odd, but it's not too much so wouldn't worry unduly (if it was 20-30 hours+ I'd be miffed).

TheInVisibleGoD said:
I've found also the text issue and "playing" with cleartype values (from powertoys) didn't solve the problem at all. Very disappointing at this aspect!

Have you tried the "secret cleartype settings" program found on the HP 2475 thread at HardForum?

TheInVisibleGoD said:
Oh... and it came with one dead pixel too...

If it's an actual whole dead pixel then you are entitled to a replacement under HP's dead pixel policy for their premium monitors - I posted a link a load of pages back to said policy.

TheInVisibleGoD · 8 Dec 2008 at 13:53

Thank you philjohn for the answer...

Actually I didn't used that "secret cleartype settings" from HardForum, I think I'll replace it as soon as I have the right to do so, as dead pixel concern! Can I do a replacement at any time, or do I have a days limit to do it?

I've made a search to the the link you refer about the HP policy, but I didn't found it... are you sure it was in this thread?

Thanks once more time m8!