The LP2480zx easily dominates every consumer-level monitor we've seen. No surprises then, as it's not one — this professional monitor was born out of a collaboration between HP and DreamWorks, and is aimed at high level designers, animators and video editors with a need for colour accuracy, and it shows in the price tag — a whopping AU$4,200.
As such it needs specialised hardware to run to its full potential — a video card and operating system that supports 30-bit colour for starters. That's not the 32-bit colour Windows claims to run in, which is actually 24-bit colour — eight bits on red, green and blue, and another eight on transparency. Nope, we're talking about proper 10 bits per colour channel 30-bit, all run on an LED backlight.
It still works wonderfully on our stock standard 24-bit video card through Windows XP, but we're not seeing everything it's capable of. With this in mind, treat this article as a preview — we've subjected the LP2480zx to the tests that we usually run on monitors, but have refrained from scoring it as we know it's capable of so much more.
Design
Straight out of the box, the LP2480zx means business. The thick chassis, usually a good sign at the professional end, is designed simply and elegantly. The footprint of the stand is surprisingly small and yet weighty, allowing smooth movement for swivel, tilt and height adjust. The screen also rotates, should you need it to, and the main panel is attached to the stand via a quick release mechanism, for easier storage when moving.
When you first turn it on, a message appears warning you that colours may not be fully accurate until the display has been left on for 30 minutes, and then proceeds to let you know how long it's been since the screen has been calibrated. Oh yes.
Menu buttons are featured on the right-hand side, and open up a context sensitive OSD to the left when pressed, akin to Dell's 2709w. It's not as intuitive as Dell's offering once you enter the menu proper, however the sheer number of options outweigh this. The buttons themselves are unlit until you press them, so they don't interfere in any way — if they're unlit, it also means you'll have to press one to activate them and access the menu, and this includes the power button, stopping any accidental switch-offs.
Features
Underneath the LP2480zx there are two DVI ports, one HDMI 1.3, one DisplayPort 1.1, component, composite and S-Video, as well as a USB upstream port to enable the four USB ports on the right-hand side.
The menu is stacked with colour space options: Full (HP's term for wide gamut, although it still exhibits the neon reds and pushed greens common to mode, is significantly more measured than most), AdobeRGB, Rec. 601, sRGB, Rec. 709, DCI P3 Emulation, and User-7. If you modify any of the above (excluding User-7), it prefixes the entries with "User", so you know it's not factory standard.
The monitor shifts reasonably smoothly between the colour palettes, and after this you can adjust the brightness/luminance on any profile between 40 and 250cd/m² in increments of one, and it actually displays these values instead of an abstracted number or unspecific bar. After this the white point can be adjusted between 4,000K and 12,000K in increments of 100, and you can view the gamma stats as well.
Black level is settable as well should you find watching a movie isn't quite acceptable, and you can turn the overdrive chip off if it causes issues.
Picture in picture (PIP) is supported, but like the Dell if you're plugged in through DVI it will only allow you to view component, S-Video or composite in the smaller image. While you can select which corner the PIP window is in, you can't adjust the size of the window, nor is the positioning any more granular than top right, top left, bottom right or bottom left, although you can do Picture by Picture if you so desire. Another limitation rears its head here: when using an analog video connection the PIP menu is disabled altogether, meaning you're restricted to analog on top of digital, unlike Dell which allows you to layer a digital source on top of an analog as well, and switch between which is the main input source.
The OSD offers eight languages, including Deutsch, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, English, Spanish, French, Italian and Dutch, it allows firmware updating, has three levels of brightness for the LEDs on the buttons, tells you how many hours the backlight has on it, and even has a sleep timer so you can schedule the monitor to turn off outside of work hours and back on in the morning. Almost every message can be turned off, and the OSD can be positioned wherever you like, with transparency, time-out and portrait/landscape settings available. Finally, you can set the top button to whatever shortcut you like via the "Function Control" entry under "OSD Control" — although we preferred it left at its default, as a quick access to colour spaces. And all this is just through the DVI port.
Switching to HDMI through our PlayStation 3 opened up a few new options, specifically the ability to set custom scaling, enabling fill to screen, fill to aspect, one to one and overscan modes. Also available under this were crop right side, crop left side and crop left and right side options, however we couldn't get these to enable over the ports we tested. Similarly the ability to adjust horizontal position, vertical position, clock and clock phase also remained disabled — we can only assume that they spring to life under S-Video, the only connection we were unable to test. Regardless, the PlayStation 3 looked excellent, with Blu-ray playback in particular being clear enough to pick out the food in Jason Statham's bottom teeth during the opening scenes of The Transporter. Of particular note, we were still able to change colour profiles from the initial XMB view and in-game, but when a Blu-ray disc was playing the gamut switching was disabled.
Hooking up the Xbox 360 over component was great in both 1080i and 1080p, but was crisp enough to highlight the need for Microsoft's pending dashboard design update. Here colour gamut switching is also disabled, but the option for hue and saturation becomes enabled. Interestingly a sharpness setting is lacking from the HP's menu, but we never found a need for one so we're not complaining. Composite looked as good as it could considering bandwidth and resolution limitations.
On the software side, HP bundles HP Display Assistant, a rebranding of PortraitDisplay's DisplayTune, also used on ViewSonic's VP2250wb (branded as PerfectSuite Plus). While this offers reasonably easy to use colour calibration and auto-pivot software, it exhibits issues detecting the display in a multi-monitor environment, choosing only to identify the HP as a "Legacy Display" until it is made the primary and only monitor enabled. We had hoped HP would opt for a stronger software suite than this catch-all solution, or would have developed its own tool. Also included is a set of PDF manuals, and a program called HP Display LiteSaver, the software implementation of HP's monitor power scheduling software.
On the accessories side, HP packs in two DVI cables, an HDMI cable, a DisplayPort cable and a USB cable for connecting the monitor to the PC.
Performance
The LP2480zx killed DisplayMate, with immaculate gradients and showing all 255 shades on the greyscale test. Gaming was great and visibly benefited from a richer colour palette. Movies were fantastic. In fact, we couldn't put one weakness on the thing, but then considering these are consumer grade tests and not colour professional ones, that's not surprising. Off-axis viewing was impressive, the tell-tale purple hue of an S-IPS monitor only coming into play at angles you wouldn't want to sit at anyway.
We have, perhaps, enjoyed this little glimpse into the professional world a little too much. Now if only we didn't have to send it back.
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