Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The NEC271W is a professional display. In the world of displays there are so much BS marketing hype tossed around in the form of insane contrast ratios, response times, memory card readers, 7 different kinds of inputs including one for your toaster and more. Anyone shopping for a display based on having a feature list you can rattle off against your friends shouldn't be looking at this display as there's plenty of Dell grade displays that will give you all that.
If you're a serious professional designer, photographer, or in the print pre-press area where color accuracy and control is critical this is your display. This is especially an important display for you if you're constantly having to work within different color gamuts as the display allows you to switch between AdobeRGB, sRGB, and the native full gamut all via the front panel. The amount of control NEC provides for this display is amazing. NEC allows you to calibrate this display to match the white point of the paper stock being used in a printer and even adjust the CMYK levels displayed so that what you see on screen is nearly proof perfect as to what will be printed. NEC tests every P-IPS LCD panel that goes into these displays and only uses the panels with the best overall uniformity. Any uniformity that's slightly off is calibrated at the factory and stored within the display hardware. There are no hot spots and the blacks are astonishingly deep, but that's what is to be expected when using P-IPS panels. These are the best LCD panels on the market period as they're a 10bit panel natively which results in an exceptionally wide color gamut, while traditional LCD panels are 8bit and cannot display as many colors.
What people might not like in the professional world is the change from 16:10 to 16:9 aspect ratio with this display. The resolution is the same width as a 30" display, but with 3 fewer inches the dpi is drastically increased as is the sharpness. The tradeoff is the vertical resolution of 1440 which lose a bit of display height compared to a traditional 30" 16:10. For me this isn't a problem, but for someone else this may be irritating, but in the world of design professionals it doesn't take much to get their panties in a bind.
This is a DVI and DisplayPort based display for inputs and requires a dual-link DVI video card. If you're on a newer Mac you will have a Mini DisplayPort, but will need an adaptor from the full-size plug to mini version. Normally I'd say buy a cable that does this, but apparently there are issues with how the cables are manufactured from Monoprice and several you'll find on Amazon. The gist is a lot of displays and video cards will ignore the incorrect wiring and things will work. This NEC plays by the rules strictly with newer ATI (AMD) video cards which will cause all sorts of sleep//wake issues. The solution is to use the included DisplayPort cable with a Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort dongle for now. Search around for this issue for more info, otherwise go with DVI if you can. This doesn't have HDMI inputs and that's a good thing. This display is nearly double the resolution that HDMI could handle and would require a hardware scaler in the display turning this professional tool into a consumer toy. Anyone that wants HDMI, composite, component, etc should look elsewhere in the pro-sumer or consumer grade display lines.
This display is enabling me to do much better work. Amazing color, viewing angles, sharpness, screen real estate, and a no nonsense bezel that's not plastered with gaudy logos are my quick awesome points, but everything above with multiple gamuts and the unreal control are panty misting worthy as a design pro. I'm in love and this is an excellent upgrade from the NEC LCD2690WUXi2 I previously had.
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