HP LP3065 Black 30

Reviewed by: slickninja

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Large real estate, relatively inexpensive, USB Hub, multiple inputs

Weaknesses: Overly bright, saturation is absurdly overdone (wide gamut), no OSD, Anti-glare coat gives the display a "dirty" look.

Overall Evaluation: Wide Gamut monitors in theory sound like a good thing, you get more color representation as the monitor tries to obtain displaying 96% of the Adobe RGB 1998 color profile as opposed 92%. Now that sounds nice, you get 4% more colors but the RGB data sent to a wide gamut display colorimetric's distance between any two colors is much larger. This means you gain more colors at the cost of less accuracy. Using the Delta E as the index for the color measurement, an RGB color of 240,250,200 and 240,250,201 would normally have a Delta E difference of about 1 on a regular LCD, 2 on a Adobe RGB display and on a wide gamut. That's a two fold increase on the Adobe RGB, and 4 on the standard. However, the OS, graphics card, Apps and so forth would all need to recognize this to make use of the colors accurately..So what does all this translate to? This display looks displays colors overly brilliantly. Remember the color setting on your old CRT TV? Its the same effect without the bleeding where the colors are unrealistic and eye fatiguing. The HP is no different. I stupidly ordered this instead of the 305T but found it unusable for motion graphics as it was too bright, too overblown and too inaccurate. As a motion graphics editor I don't demand the same precision as my print media friends do but I do want a display I can stare at for hours and displays the colors well. THe 3065 is NOT that display. .I've used several 30 inch displays. To this day the 305T has been my favorite. I'm boxing this and sending it back. With OS X, there's simply no hardware controls for nVidia but even in windows this display is disgustingly overdone. .Of course you can listen to all the positive reviews, but if you value accuracy at all this is not the display for you. .One strange feature that's welcome but totally unnecessary is the 3065 sports 3 inputs. Seeing that the display cannot do scaling it will not double as an HDTV. It will only accept 1280 x 800 or 2560 x 1600.