Originally posted by: Winterpool
TFT Central, in their
review of the Dell U2410, strongly urge punters to read
this X-bit labs discussion of extended colour gamuts. A wider gamut theoretically can display a greater range of colours -- good, right? But if displaying colours from a more limited source (
eg sRGB content), an extended-gamut monitor will 'stretch' out the colours it's trying to display from sRGB to fit the monitor's own wider gamut. So you get inaccurate colours which often look oversaturated. A lot of punters learn to enjoy inaccurate, oversaturated displays (this is a notorious issue in the TV market), but if you do colour-sensitive work, or even if you simply enjoy, ahem, appreciating realistic flesh tones on your monitor, when pink looks neon red, you may not be best pleased.
If you review the very lengthy Hard|Forum thread on the HP LP2475w (the first affordable wide-gamut IPS display), you'll see quite a few punters gnashing their teeth over the bright-red results when trying to view sRGB content. Lots of shots of pink flamingos, I seem to recall.
Web content is sRGB.
You can try calibrating your monitor to ameliorate the effects, but this doesn't remove the fundamental problem (stretching a narrower source colour range across a much wider display gamut). One partial fix is colour-aware applications (Firefox is colour-aware) which can load a calibrated profile to display content from particular spaces more accurately. Unfortunately, many apps are currently not so configurable. Also uncertain how much Windows 7 itself is colour-aware in this regard.
Essentially I held off buying the HP LP2475w owing to this issue. I'm thrilled that the Dell U2410 has a usable sRGB mode, but the visible dithering is currently a dealbreaker.
(X-bit labs also discusses the problem of smooth colour gradients when you're working with different gamut sources and displays; here we must also discuss the video signal being generated by your graphics card. The solution appears to be 10-bit video, but there is little support so far... As mentioned before, the Dell dithering problem may stem from 8-bit to 12 to 10 and then sRGB conversion -- a lot of converting going on!)
I'm sure I've misunderstood or elided various details. XTKnight and others will certainly clarify anything I've muddled.
Edited: all this is to say, if you don't employ Dell's sRGB mode, you'll probably be able to avoid the dithering (no one seems to report this issue when using the native wide gamut of the display), but you'll suffer inaccurate, oversaturated colours when viewing sRGB content (
eg the Web). You'll basically have the same problems as an HP LP2475w owner.
Some punters may find it acceptable to switch between modes, for example using sRGB most of the time (web browsing) but using the standard wide-gamut mode when viewing dark imagery. Too awkward? Then we shall have to wait and see if Dell has any sort of fix. Or you could buy a much costlier NEC.