Monitor: Dell 3008 WFP

The 30" Godzilla is back, and this time the kitchen sink is included.

Dell was the first company to hit us with an epic 30in screen back in the day when they were new and shiny. It was awesome in almost every way, except that unlike some smaller screens, the 30-inchers only had a single dual link DVI input and no real controls.

We saw the same thing happen on all the other 30in panels and talked to some engineers at HP; we discovered the problem was that behind the panel there was only just enough electronics to display images. This explained why early models had brightness controls that could only dim the backlight, and a dual link DVI input.

The height of the 30in world was HP’s LP3065, a model with an input selector that would switch between one of three DVI inputs. Cool, but essentially a glorified inbuilt KVM without the K or M. What was needed was scaling electronics that could drive other signals into the 30in panels -- and electronics that could deal with the 30in crowd’s better than HD resolution didn’t exist.

Until now.

Here she is. This is Dell’s new 30in display, which comes complete with almost every input in the world. There’s two DVI-D inputs as well as VGA. You get every useful analogue input available: one each of composite, component and S-video. There’s also HDMI and even the strange and similar Display Port. In fact the only inputs that aren’t here are professional ones, like HD-SDI, that 0.01 per cent of people would find useful.

It shares the bezel styling and menu structure of its smaller 27in cousin, the 2707WFP. If you ask us, the new 3008 looks better than the old model. More importantly, the new rotating arm it sits on swings and pivots into more positions than the older model. Not as high, perhaps, but having a whole extra axis to play with certainly helps.

The menu system lets you enable picture-beside-picture mode, which gives you two 4:3 frames next to each other. The left side can display one of the following: component, VGA or Display Port, while the other can display either one of the DVI connectors, composite, S-video or HDMI. Sadly this system does limit some of your options: you can’t, for example, split-screen two computers both connected through DVI.

The 3008 is powered by an S-IPS panel, and its WCCFL backlight gives it a wide gamut of white to filter. As well as custom settings that show its consumer heritage (there is no black level setting or other more advanced options) it comes with Adobe RGB and sRGB presets as well as the kind-of-pointless warm and cool options. You can also do the adjustment through the video card with DCC/CI.

Overall performance is generally very good, and you simply can’t beat the immersion factor of playing on a 30in monitor (before getting silly with curved concept displays). 1080p content looks beautiful, and if you want to smile and bask in the glory of your dWang (Display Wang) you can always switch to 1:1 aspect ratio and watch 1080p content in the centre of the frame surrounded by a fair bit of black.

The scaling is great from high resolution sources, but lower resolutions (especially interlaced low resolutions – we’re looking at you, composite) don’t fare as well. But at least you do get the video sources. And even though it’s not a good idea, it’s nice to know you can now run the 3008 with a single link DVI cable from your PC.

We did run into a few problems though.

The sample we had suffered from a bleeding backlight. When displaying a pure black signal, a small area at the top left of the screen was noticeably brighter than the rest of the screen. And there was a similar but bigger bleed problem in bottom right hand corner.

Although our Display Mate colourimetry tests were quite well balanced (even on the default settings) the panel had some trouble reaching for deep blacks without crunching out. It got better, at the expense of its top end white values, as we cranked it up to a retina-cooking full brightness.

The industry standard Guitar Hero lag calibration test confirmed that the analogue video inputs have about 100ms of input lag. Although your audio will hit you a touch before your video, 100ms is a better result than a lot of other monitors we’ve seen through the labs. Most of the time your brain will do the smoothing for you; you shouldn’t notice the gap. Unless, like us, you’re a bit of a pedant -- in which case you might.

For most people, however, these little foibles are far outweighed by the sheer scale and versatility of the thing. And to illustrate the versatility point, there are even three 3.5mm outputs for sending analogue surround sound to amplified speakers straight from the monitor. The audio from the HDMI input is decoded in the monitor and can be output as stereo or surround from within the monitor’s menu. Brilliant.

It’s not perfect, but for all intents and purposes it is the new display God.