Great Display with Abysmal Connectivity
Pros:
Great hi-res display, plenty of brightness even next to a large window.
Cons:
Only one DVI input, and dismal 1280x800 resolution over any single-link DVI connection.
The Bottom Line:
Limited input connections and no possibility for video scaling makes this a poor choice for a large 30-inch display. The Gateway 30-inch or the Dell WFP3008 are a better choice.
|
|
Overall Rating:
|
 |
|
Author's Review
This Dell 30-inch widescreen display used to be their flagship monitor. By all standards it was huge, with a breathtaking 2560x1600 resolution that is actually better than human 20/20 vision.
It offers tons of screen real estate for engineers, CAD software, and graphics applications.
The bad news is that in order to attain this fantastic resolution, you have to have a video card capable of dual link DVI output. And even worse, the display does absolutely no scaling on its own, meaning that using a regular single-link DVI output you get a really poor 1280x800 resolution. You can't even get the maximum resolution supported by a single link DVI connection of 1920x1200!
The only input to the display is a lone DVI connector. When connected to an appropriate graphics card to run at full resolution, it looks awesome. When connected to anything else, it looks really, really crummy. It's like running windows at 800x600 resolution.
Only two laptop models have ever been produced that have the required dual-link DVI output. Thus if you intend to connect this display to your laptop, it is highly unlikely you have one that will drive the monitor at anything other than 1280x800.
To make matters worse, Dell has pretty much abandoned this model. They are switching over to a new display standard called DisplayPort. So it is unlikely future laptops from Dell will ever support the WFP3007 display. Instead their solution was to produce a new monitor model, the WFP3008.
Dell does actually offer a DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter as of February 2009, however, it only supports single link DVI and resolutions up to 1920x1200....making it worthless for use on the WFP3007 display. Apple was a bit further sighted, and offers a similar miniDisplayPort-to-DVI adapter, however reports indicate it has numerous problems working with either the Dell 30" or even the Apple 30" displays.
Tread carefully before purchasing a WFP3007....you'll likely find it isn't what you thought it would be. A better option is the Gateway 30" display with all kinds of connections for various display inputs as well as internal scaling for virtually any resolution you wish to feed it.
