New monitor up to £1000

ed2353

ed2353

ed2353

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6 Feb 2008
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I currently have a 26" IIyama E2607WS running 1920x1200 off my HD7970.
I use the usual Microsoft Office on Windows 8.1.
I'm not concerned about high quality colour matching or Multiplayer games, but I do play BF3, Crysis1-3, Farcry, etc. single player campaigns.

I enjoy the extra vertical estate of the 1200 vs 1080, but now I would like to have a larger monitor.

I had thought to buy the Dell UltraSharp U3014 30" 2560x1600, but I've seen so many complaints about Dell monitors that I'm now very wary.

I also wondered about a 32" TV (say, Samsung UE32F5000 at around £280), but that would limit me to 1920x1080.

My other line of thinking was 27" 2560x1440, though I wonder whether I will end up squinting at small text.

So your suggestions please on a 27" - 30" monitor for normal office use plus single player gaming, up to £1000.
 
27" 1440p is actually very nice in terms of size, I find. I certainly wouldn't be looking at a 1080p solution above 24", especially with your budget.

The Dell U2711 (old model) is a very highly considered monitor. The issue with the new version is backlight bleed - if you look into the thread on here you can ready many people's experience with this.

Of course with £1000 budget you can look at the 1600p 30" monitors which may be a better fit
 
Does the Dell 30" not have the same problems that the 27" version seems to have?

I also considered the OC QH300, but that is a Korean make, then there is the DGM on pre-order.

None of them have customer reviews, so I'm looking to Forum members to give me REAL information to help me decide.

Thanks guys (and girls).
 
Your budget of £1000 is probably too much for what you actually need I think and is probably leading to recommendations of screens which are unsuitable for your uses. It sounds like you need a large monitor primarily for gaming really. The text size / pixel pitch is pretty comparable between a 27" 2560 x 1440 monitor and a 30" 2560 x 1600. Both will take a bit of getting used to when moving from your current screen, but after a few days you will be fine i'm sure and find it hard to go back to anything smaller. the extra desktop real-estate and size is a pleasure to use.

Do you actually want or need wide gamut backlighting as really thats going to be the thinig here which separates the screens costing ~£500 from the screens costing up towards £1000. unless you actually need to use wide gamut content, it will probably be totally unnecessary and you might even have problems with the colours looking oversaturated or unrealistic anyway. The expensive screens are normally those with wide gamut backlighting, and in turn they are more aimed at professional uses. You probably don't need all the expensive features like hardware calibration, 10-bit colour depth support etc. Those high end screens offering those features are not as suited for gaming either, so it's probably the opposite of what you want.

Models like the Dell U2713H and U3014 are within your budget of course, but they aren't really very well suited for gaming. they have some pretty bad overdrive overshoot problems and you're paying a lot of money for the wide gamut backlight, hardware calibration etc which it doesn't sound like you even need. see reviews of both here:

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews_index.htm

Models like the OC QH300 (also known as Achieva QH300, again review in link above) are again wide gamut. worse still, they don't have an sRGB emulation option so youre stuck with wide gamut. I wouldn't say that it is very well suited to gaming either, as although the response times are low (for an IPS panel), the lag is quite high and there are limited scaling options as well.

I think personally you'd be better looking at some of the standard gamut 27" models around, and find one which is more suited to your uses. I'd suggest looking at the Dell U2713HM (although the quality control is very variable), Asus PB278Q and ViewSonic VP2770-LED. Those have standard gamut backlighting, don't feature all the extras you don't need but have a better response time performance, freedome from the nbad overshoot problems and more suitable lag for gaming. Will also save you £500 or so :)
 
Thanks Baddass. You are right in your assumptions about my priorities and you've crystallised some of my own thinking. I didn't really want to spend £1000 if a £500 monitor would do what I want.

The Asus PB278Q was already in my sights, but I'll take a look at the Viewsonic VP2770 LED before I decide which to purchase. The only other one I was originally thinking about was the Iiyama Prolite XB2776QS 27" AH-IPS, simply because my present Iiyama has been so good.

Thanks again.
 
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