Elegant design; practical size; excellent brightness and contrast; four USB 2.0 ports; memory card slots
Expensive; small problems with uniformity, ghosting and colour-tracking artefacts; lacks some advanced settings; generates too much heat
The Dell UltraSharp 2707WFP is expensive and not quite up to the task for professional imaging. However, its elegant design, big screen and copious extras will appeal to normal users with deep enough pockets
7.4 Very good
Reviewed by Sandra Vogel
Everyone has their own idea of the perfect display size, determined by some mystical combination of applications used, available desk space, viewing distance and resolution -- tempered by a degree of techie feng shui and a hearty dose of budgetary reality. Remove our budget ceiling from the equation -- it's much less than the £1,041 list price Dell has given the UltraSharp 2707WFP -- and we'd have to say that 27 inches is our new sweet spot. Anything smaller is too small, and the 30-inch screens are too big: the 16-inch-high screen on the 2707WFP perfectly complements the adjoining Sony Artisan CRT on our desk.
If we didn't need exceptionally accurate colour, the 2707WFP might even suffice by itself: it's large enough to view two A4 facing pages at actual size, a dizzying number of Adobe Lightroom image thumbnails and twice as many rows and columns in Excel or Access as are visible on the CRT -- not to mention providing enough space to make Outlook's right-hand preview pane layout practical.
Design and features
As you'd expect, the 2707WFP is pretty easy to set up. The solid glass base provides an unshakable ballast. You can quickly route all cables through the neck, thanks to a slide-off plastic cover. The two USB ports in the back are nice for routing the cables of more permanently attached devices, while the side ports can be used for quick hookups to USB flash drives and such.
Although the 2707WFP has most of the features you'd consider essential in a display, it had some notable omissions. We'd much prefer two DVI connectors with a VGA adaptor option rather than one of each. And no HDMI at this price seems a little stingy.
We also found the colour controls in the on-screen menus lacking -- PC Normal, PC Red (warmer) and PC Blue (cooler) lack context in the world of photography or video and seem to just make the display really red or really blue. You can adjust the individual RGB outputs, but it's a pain. We would have preferred to have seen colour temperature settings for the experts and meaningful presets for movies, graphics, work and so on for more casual users.
Thankfully, there are presets on the analogue input: Standard and Vivid. Additionally, it does offer PC Mode and Mac Mode, which we assume refer to the standard 1.8 and 2.2 gammas, respectively. Unfortunately, the manual isn't specific -- it explains modes with the unhelpfully tautological explanation of 'To achieve the different color mode for PC and Mac'.
Dell fares better on the non-display options, such as the built-in CompactFlash, SD/MMC, Memory Stick and SmartMedia card slots, which mount on your system when you plug in the upstream USB cable. The card slots perform quite zippily, as expected of a USB 2.0 transfer rate. There's also, as previously mentioned, a total of four USB 2.0 ports -- two in the back and two in the sides. The side ports are especially nice for those who like to keep their PC system boxes out of the way; they can still snap in a USB flash drive without much effort.
Performance
There's been some online grumbling about the 2707WFP's low resolution (1,920x1,200 pixels) for its size. We have to admit, there's some truth to the resolution issue. The way the numbers work out, the 2707WFP has a resolution density of about 83 pixels per inch (ppi), which is effectively the same as working on a 15-inch monitor at 1,024x768-pixel resolution. Remember those days? At their native resolution, most current LCD monitors operate at a minimum of 96ppi, and laptop displays are even denser. As a result, text and graphics on the 2707WFP look comparatively coarse, and extended viewing may leave you feeling somewhat woozy, as it did us.
Of course, the wooziness factor may also be affected by the amount of heat generated by the display, which radiates both from the back and the front of the screen. We definitely felt the difference over the course of a working day, with the display about 30cm away. Of course the large screen does facilitate sitting further from the screen, which we'd recommend after our testing.
Although the 2707WFP may never be the sharpest knife in the drawer, it's probably the brightest, which goes a long way to compensating for its resolution issues. It boasts an incredibly high contrast ratio of 1,000:1 -- although we measured it closer to 1,200:1 -- and a brightness output of 438cd/m2. To put that in perspective, the larger Apple Cinema Displays have only 700:1 with a 400cd/m2 brightness. Very impressive.
All of these overactive whites and deep blacks serve to make saturated colours in movies, photos and graphics practically leap off the screen. Likewise, extremely light colours remain visible and defined. The 2707WFP has no gamut-mapping problems at these extremes. At various levels of saturation between the two extremes, however -- the middle 55 per cent or so -- there are pockets of colours that the display can't reproduce properly. This display also has poor brightness uniformity: on a black screen, you can clearly see light emanating from three of the four corners. There's also various red and green colour contamination visible in greyscale midtones and lighter blues look positively purple.
All these factors explain some of our observations during testing, including soft, grainy, noisy video on the one hand but sharp, detailed games with highly saturated colours on the other. Note that the noise we observed wasn't something introduced by the 2707WFP -- it's just that the by-product of having such a bright screen is that it exposes all the faults of the source material. The bottom line is that your holiday snapshots will look great, but you don't want to do any colour-critical work on this monster. It's a common fallacy among marketers that 'vivid colours' is synonymous with 'great for digital imaging' and 'accurate colours'. And videos look great at actual resolution but considerably worse when filling the screen TV-style. However, that's only to be expected when watching a DVD from only 30cm away.
Conclusion
The real sticking point on the UltraSharp 2707WFP is the price, especially since it's about twice as expensive as its 24-inch sibling, the UltraSharp 2407WFP. Although the 2407WFP can't match the 2707WFP's pixel response rate or contrast ratio, we think the 27-inch model's performance doesn't justify its price premium; the 2407WFP is better value.
Of course, the 2707WFP's extremely bright and vivid picture looks great for some tasks, and plenty of non-critical viewers will love the picture. In all, despite some faults, the 2707WFP's large size, slick design, extra features and relatively good performance for casual uses add up to an impressive package -- we just think it should cost considerably less.
Edited by Charles McLellan
Additional editing by Nick Hide
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