My good friend Matt and I just purchased new monitors. We'd both been intrigued by the 29" ultra widescreen monitors which have appeared over the past year from LG, AOC and Dell. So when we saw an awesome deal on the Dell U2913WM we both jumped at the chance to get one. Or to be more honest Matt jumped first and I wasn't going to be left out of it.
The Dell u2913wm is the equivalent of having two 1280x1024 standard ratio monitors joined together (with a few extra pixels in height) and the picture below (which is how I now have it set up) shows you roughly how it compares next to a 19" widescreen 1440x900 monitor. It's not a natural monitor width at 2560x1080 and it takes some used to getting to working with it, but I'm really pleased. Firstly is bright and even with good color rendition. In fact it comes color calibrated from the factory (they even give you a print out). In the image below I hope you can see that the whites are muddy on the Dell Pro series monitor (top)next to the Ultrasharp 29". While I've had other IPS panel based monitors this seems a lot cleaner handling text and color rendition, but it might be the shiny new monitor smell working it's magic on me.
One of the appealing things about this monitor is the ability to watch movies in an aspect ratio a lot closer to the original theatrical release. As I have my main PC set up on a desk in the living room the display often doubles for a television. My wife and I don't watch a lot of TV, but we often watch Netflix or the occasional Amazon.com instant video purchase. It's nice to see movies showing all the edge detail. Your DVD and Blu ray widescreen movies fill the screen without excessive letterboxing.
The options for connecting computer monitors have got a little mixed up over the past few years, with so many ways to connect your humble PC to the display. This is the first monitor I've seen which covers almost all the options.
The only connections you can't see in this picture are the main power in, and two USB 3.0 A connections (outs) located on the side of the monitor bezel. From left to right you have power out (for an ultrasharp speaker bar), analog VGA in, DisplayPort in, mini DisplayPort in, DVI in (it has to be dual-link DVI-D for this resolution), HDMI in, DisplayPort out (daisychain), audio out (from the HDMI or DisplayPort digital audio channels), USB 3.0 in and two USB 3.0 out. An amazing array of connections in my opinion.
Out of the box I had issues with getting the monitor setup, however it was user error and not the monitor at fault. I attached my monitor to an Atdec dual (vertical) monitor stand along with the 19" monitor in the second picture. This did not give me much space to connect the cabling. So I connected the included DisplayPort cable to the first DP port I could find. It just happened to be the output connection and not the input. After a couple of idiot checks on my part I worked out the issue.
This monitor is interesting in that it supports the daisychaining of multiple high resolution DisplayPort monitors. Both Matt and I were interested in checking this out, but we didn't have a chance to get the monitors together. However I found this picture of the bizarre setup over at overclock.net. Considering how wide my single monitor appears the two of them would probably give you serious neck ache.
DisplayPort, in a similar way to HDMI in the consumer audio/video space, is going through an evolution. HDMI is now up to version 1.4 and if you do not purchase the right revision of the cable you may not be able to play 3D content to your TV or stream data from your network capable Blu Ray player. Some might call those first world problems, but I don't always think it's obvious to Joe public that these issues exist.
The DP cable shown above gives you plenty of information about why you should get this cable. High resolution support up to 3840x2160 which is proper 4K (the equivalent of four 1080p displays in a 2x2 grid). It also has 4 data lanes of 5.4Gbps throughput, which is where the "2x faster than DisplayPort 1.1" claim comes in. These multiple streams of graphical data are how the daisychaining ability works, by passing through certain channels/streams to the next monitor in the line. It will be interesting to see how long before 4K desktop monitors become common place, right now they are available, however they have limited refresh rates and require some tweaking to get working correctly with your video card. But both DisplayPort and HDMI may be on the verge of launching the new standards that make up version 2.0 of the cable specifications.
So what will I be using my 2560x1080 monitor for this evening... well I'll be heroically helping my tanking buddies capture the enemy flag. But I should also tell you it's awesome for spreadsheets too.
This monitor finally stopped responding to button function presses and I was unable to get a picture any longer. In fact the display showed a composite in icon on the screen (there isn't composite input)!I was able to find a replacement logic board on eBay and replaced the faulty part. The new board was a later revision and the monitor has worked flawlessly since then. I am happier now than when I purchased the monitor and it is 6+ years old now.
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