HP LP3065

HP enters the 30" screen battlefield.

A new segment in the monitor market has emerged, and it is literally, a sight to behold.

Back in 2004 you could only buy one 30" monitor – from Apple – and this was aimed squarely at the design market. Now, the other major players – Dell, Samsung and now HP – are all offering 30" displays to the consumer market. We would have expected to see these displays being provided by companies like Eizo, Lacie and other organisations specialising in the professional domain.

The HP LP3065 uses the same S-IPS panel as Dell’s most recent 30" monitor. It also uses a WCCFL backlight that reproduces 92 percent of the NTSC colour gamut. The beefy backlight provides a purer white – the number of colours exceeding that of normal backlights – giving the transistors in the panel more colours to filter. The end result is a more subdued and accurate image.

It’s hardly surprising that the HP gave us the same DisplayMate results as the Dell: blacks went down to four before becoming indiscernible from each other and the whites went up to 251 before blowing out. Gradients were excellent with minimal banding, however, like the Dell, we could see a purple tinge while benchmarking that you wouldn’t notice in everyday use. It’s bright too, thanks to the 1000:1 contrast ratio, and there is no bleeding at the edges.

Four USB ports are hidden behind the left side of the unobtrusive bezel. There aren’t any card readers built in – which is surprising, because they are popping up everywhere else – although the LP3065 makes up for this with its party trick: not one, but three dual-link DVI inputs.

You can switch between them with the dedicated source button on the front of the unobtrusive bezel. There are two DVI-D cables in the box to sweeten the deal too.

Like all 30” monitors we’ve seen so far, there are no VGA, composite, S-Video or component connections for you to hook up consoles or other analogue sources. We’ve been told by HP that a scaler IC has to be built into the panel before we’ll see that in any 30" display.

You can’t hijack the DVI ports to plug VGA connectors into the monitor with an adaptor either – or for that matter any DVI plug on any monitor – because the DVI standard just doesn’t allow it. The little pins around the flat connector of a DVI connector on video cards that carry the red, green, blue and horizontal synchronisation signals for VGA backwards compatibility are blocked off on the DVI connectors of monitors. You can use HDMI connectors with a converter, but as a rule you’re limited to digital connections.

The controls on the bezel are limited to power, source and brightness. Colour controls are left to your video card, as there is no OSD. The stand gives you more play than the Dell – and far more than the Apple 30" Cinema HD – and there’s an ingenious sliding lock mechanism on the back that doesn’t make setup feel like it should be a two-man job.

At a hair under $3000, it’s a little pricier than the Dell, but it does offer more flexibility. Provided your hardware is up to the task of powering it, gaming is beautiful, with no noticeable blurriness and an unsurpassed sense of immersion – provided you don’t understand or care about the words ‘too big’.