LevelsOfDetail

Yes, I know. This blog is turning into me rambling about monitors. Or maybe it always was. I dunno.

Anyways, I returned the Hp 2475w because of the green/pink tints. I bought it through CDW since a sales rep that told me that they had a 30-day refund policy, but I found out through all this that HP products are excepted. So I had a fun time trying to talk to HP customer support (I later read on HardForum that one should call the Business support line, since this is a business product. If you call the consumer line, they don't even list a category for monitors).

Long story short, the CDW rep eventually set up an RMA for me so that was that.

And today, I finally ordered the 2490. This is silly, I've been working up to this for how long now? Like 9 months? And the thing hasn't gotten any cheaper either.

So the theory is that the 2490 appears to be the last of the good sRGB monitors. Maybe wide gamut is the future, but it's not an overstatement to say that the rest of the industry hasn't figured out how to deal with it yet. And by the rest of the industry, I really mean Windows and it's ecosystem. Yes, there are some expensive color-managed apps out there that work today. Yes, there are a very small number of video cards that can do 10-bit color, over display port. Yes, Vista makes things a little better (except for the whole UAC blowing away your gamma LUT thing). But what I really mean by "figured out" is having all apps work the way they were intended, including non-color-managed ones. I'm not sure exactly how that would work, but you'd think with graphics cards being so powerful, something can be done. Maybe the future is Microsoft's scRGB and 10 or 16bits per channel over some nextgen interface. I've been around long enough to know that that ain't going to be pervasive for at least another 5 years, and in the meanwhile, the 2490 will do just fine.

I'm also liable (unfortunately) to be hooking up a Linux box to my monitors for many years to come, so going with an sRGB monitor is still the safest bet. Whatever solution the Windows people come up with, it'll probably land on the Linux side another 2-3 years later. The 2490's hardware calibration means in theory I can even have correct colors under Linux today. Surely, that's worth something.

And in a final bout of self-justification, I realized that when I purchased my Planar PL201M 5-6 years ago, it cost $900 or so. If I were willing to spend that much then, this 2490 is actually cheaper to me after inflation.

Anyways, hopefully finally, I can put this whole thing to rest now, at least for another few years. It's about time.

Ok, I've had the 2490 for about a week now, and I can definitely say I made the right choice.

No crappy wide gamut. No crappy screen coating. Fantastic viewing angles. Fantastic color and brightness uniformity. And ghosting and input lag don't seem to be issues. There is some bleeding when the screen is dark, but all reports seem to indicate that the screen needs to be "burned in" for these effects go away.

I really should have just started with this one. It would have saved me a lot of headaches. I guess I just have ot resign to spending $1k on a monitor ($1099 from Amazon, to be exact) every few years. I am still nagged by the thought that I could have gotten a 30 inch instead, but I think I'll way X more years until the wide gamut issue is sorted out, and the uniformity issue on large screens is also fixed.

So, in the end:

• Dell 3007WFP-HC: Crap
• HP LP2475w: OK, but uniformity issues and wide gamut
• NEC 2490Wuxi: Sweet. Worth the $ if you care about those things

My coworker just got a new HP EliteBook, and we put Ubuntu 8.10 and it and it works, well, suprisingly well. Almost everything works out of the box, and suspend and resume is actually fast. It is tempting me to try 8.10 on my X60 again (I still have a partition). I know this is not going to end well. Damnit.

It seems like I've been struggling with how to complete this phrase for way too long.

But I think it just occured to me how it should go:

... when I can _use_ all the hardware I paid for.

That's really what it comes down to. I buy hardware. I expect the software to work with it, to let me take advantage of the hardware's features. If I didn't want the hardware feature, I wouldn't have bought the hardware. Simple as that.

For the hardware that I buy, Windows (and it's software ecosystem) is still the best solution. Whether it's the thinkpad and it's power saving, or whether it's my digital camera and it's RAW files, or whether it's my new monitor with it's hardware calibration settings, or whether it's my cheapo dvd-rom and it's ability to play DVD's.

Linux hackers and Linux distributors haven't figured out how to create incentives for others to enable the best of the hardware out there.

Of course, the corollary to that is if I limit my hardware choices, then Linux should be just fine. This used to be really hard to do, even for desktops. It all depended on the motherboard, or the ethernet chip, or wireless chip, of even graphics chip that you decided to get. These days, the task looks decidedly easier, so I might just give it another shot.

Just about 2 years after Vista's initial availability, I finally installed it on my primary desktop at home.

Actually, the machine has been in a pretty sad state of running 32-bit XP on a machine with 6 Gb of RAM for several months now. Vista x64 is the only useful 64-bit version of Windows, so here we are.

So far, things seem to be OK. I managed to use the opportunity to change my boot drive to a newly acquired WD Velociraptor, which seems to be doing quite alright. 5.9 on the vista disk performance index, whatever that means.

I'm kinda tired of the Vista hating. Yes, it sucks on old machines, but on a decently new machine, it's just fine (and most of my current desktop is 2 years old). It's the only Windows OS that lets you use >3GB of RAM, and there are tons of kernel improvements that can really benefit power users. Try using Windows Search on an XP machine with a giant cached outlook mailbox. It totally sucks. Only the vista scheduler and low-priority I/O support make it bearable.

I got this thing up and running in an hour. I still can't say the same about Linux. Mac OSX sure, but I don't want to pay 3k for a MacPro, so that comparison is irrelevant for me.

Found here.

Interestingly, there's a fairly long "Known Issues" section. It's disappointing how many issues there are, but at the same time, the listing here is very helpful. It's good to know that certain hardware is known not to work so that I don't spend all my time trying to debug it.

It's kinda sad that all these different distros need to develop their own testing methodologies. It seems like one area where the open source model could really work. Everyone co-develops a comprehensive test suite, which would then lower costs for OEMs and actually let them concentrate on delivering better hardware.

Too bad you can't get the distros to agree on anything.