I posted this on another forum earlier tonight, but I thought one more opinion might be of interest here as well.
I ordered an LP2475w three days ago, after reading various mostly very positive professional reviews. My original intent was to replace my aging Samsung 226BW with a 26" TN panel monitor, eg. the Samsung T260, but after seeing my fathers new 22" Eizo in action when I visited during the holidays, I got a strong urge to try a better panel type - even if it meant settling for a 24" model.
And then the day after placing my order I started coming across all these complaints about problems with the LP2475w, and I started wondering if I had just made a very big mistake when I ordered this monitor.
It arrived yesterday (GIG173, Poland November 2009, FW GIG 077), and while I've only been using it for 18 hours and have had to settle for using the calibration tips and files provided at tftcentral.co.uk (their monitor settings were however a bit too green for my liking, so I'm using 251 222 242, plus green black level lowered to 30 - trying 40 at the moment - through the HP Display Assistant) rather than a hardware calibration tool, it's definitely obvious that with white or other very light colors, there's a slight but still noticeable difference in color temperature(?) between left and right side of the screen - and calling it a green-pink "tint" probably isn't too far of the mark (at least the green tint on the left side, the right side of the screen is actually how I would like the full image to be).
Since it looks like something I'll quickly learn to ignore once I'm a few days past the new monitor phase (I've pretty much already stopped noticing it, and additionally moving my desk lamp from it's usual place right next to me on the left side, to a place where it provides more indirect background lighting instead, also helped considerably), and since I won't be using the monitor for color critical work, I won't bother asking for a replacement, but it's a little disappointing none the less.
Aside from that issue - and buttons on the monitor that have a rather cheap feel to them - this is a huge step up in quality from my old 226BW. No detectable backlight bleeding, only minor white glow at night with a full black screen, vastly better viewing angles (particularly obvious at the top of the screen where I no longer have to suffer horrendous contrast shifts when I lean back in my chair a little in a relaxed position) and fantastic colors that are very different but much more nuanced and to my eyes much more natural than what I've been used to from TN panels.
Well, the excessive wide gamut reds aside - using color aware applications (such as one of my image viewers) really do show a rather large difference between the desktop colors and programs that can utilize the ICC profile I downloaded from TFT Central.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around all this stuff that I've been reading about color profiles, but if I've understood it correctly, even Windows 7 (I'm on Vista x64) isn't able to use color profiles system wide, but still "suffers" from wide gamut over saturation on the desktop and applications that aren't color aware (ie. no different from Vista at all)?
Update: By recommendation I updated my Nvidia driver to one that supports "negative" digital vibrance values.
I couldn't go below the default 0% on my 182.06 driver, but in more recent versions the default is 50%. I currently have it set at 40% and the difference is striking on particularly those previously radioactive reds. In fact the desktop colors are no longer too far from the result I get in color aware applications, albeit with an overall warmer red tone where the profiled colors lean towards green.
I'm still experimenting with the monitor color settings through HP Display Assistant, but getting the green even remotely close to the value suggested by TFT Central (235, I'm still at 222) just doesn't look good to me - whether it's down to differences between the individual monitors or just my eyes that don't like an image with a greenish tint.
Actually matching the much more pleasant albeit also slightly greenish look of the ICC profiled colors, doesn't seem possible. But then I guess that would be impossible - color profiles are there for a reason after all.
Oh, and I love the 1920x1200 resolution. I never thought it would feel like this much of a step up from 1680x1050, but it really does provide a whole lot of extra screen space and has already entirely changed the way I resize and place windows.
Now there's actually room for having another window next to the web browser, something I never quite felt was possible on my old screen, so I always ended up running most applications maximized.
So overall I'm very happy with my purchase, but I have to admit that if I had come across this thread and another very long one before I ordered the LP2475w, I imagine there's a very good chance I would have opted for something else.
All these horror stories from people having received two, three or even four replacements are pretty scary. And as mentioned even mine has one of the common problems brought up, just fortunately not so bad I can't live with it.
But I guess if you want an IPS panel in this price range the options are rather limited.
