Brightness homogeneity
The gamut is close to LED monitors but we were pessimistic in expecting to see improvements in brightness homogeneity. There are still a large number of neon tubes in the back with reflectors that are supposed to diminish or reduce brightness variations in areas that are the furthest from the tubes.
We were wrong to be skeptical and we measured serious improvements…at least for Dell. In this test, we measured the brightness intensity on several areas of the panel. For the graph below, the top color corresponds to the brighter area and the lower, the darker one.
PVA 5 ms : Acer AL2616WD
PVA 6 ms : Dell 2707WFPThis graph isn't enough by itself. It shows that the brightness homogeneity is better for Dell, but it doesn't tell us the actual proportion.
For example, with the Acer we understand that the maximum brightness gap is comprised between 20 and 40% and 5 and 15% with Dell. To be more accurate, with our probe we measured 32% for the Acer AL2606WD and 12% with the Dell 2707WFP.
With standard color adjustments and the brightness gap, the Dell is definitively the better for image professionals. It is interesting to compare these results with the Samsung LED:
A-MVA 8 ms : Samsung SyncMaster XL20With the XL20, the maximum gap between the two corners is 13% and comparable to our measurements with the Dell 2707WFP. This is bad news for Samsung. Their 20" monitor is similarly priced to the Dell despite being much smaller, not full HD, without a memory card player, etc.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to point out that these good results with the Dell monitor can be subject to variations from one model to another. This manufacturer sometimes changes components and there can be several successive versions of the same product. Ours was a REV A000. Also, proper transport is of outmost importance, as each bump is a risk to reduction of color fidelity and, for example, light reflector misalignments.
