DoubleSight DS-277W: Back to the Drawing Board
by Chris Heinonen on June 13, 2012 1:30 AM ESTStraight out of the box and set to 200 nits, the DS-277W offered pretty respectable performance with an average dE of only 6.46. Blues were the main issue, but the grayscale was pretty respectable without calibration, which is the most important aspect with the dE value.
Once calibrated to D65 with 2.2 gamma, the dE drops way down to 1.5 on average. Amazingly this is in line with the more expensive NEC PA271W that I had just tested. The grayscale was nice and flat, and the only colors with an error over 3 were those shades of blue we always see having issues. So despite those huge issues with the brightness level, if you keep yourself at a happy medium light output level, you can get good color results out of the DS-277W.
Median color error for 200 nits was the second-best that we have seen. Half of the colors have an error of 1 or less, rendering the difference totally invisible the eye, and a few poor colors are dragging the average way down. If you know what colors are causing this, this can be good as the grayscale and other colors will be accurate, you just need to know that blues will be more incorrect than other shades.
As mentioned on the brightness page, the lowest output level was 140 nits, which means the LUTs have to be adjusted down for reaching 100 nits of light output. This can be done, but shifting the levels to such a large degree can also lead to posterization, a lack of full dynamic range, and other issues with your output, and this is now video card dependant. Possibly because of this the 100 nits average dE rises up to over 2.0 from the 1.5 at 200 nits. Of course since this display only goes down to 140 nits, I would not recommend it for print work either, regardless of the dE value here.
However, it does have a panel and backlighting system with a full AdobeRGB colorspace, and can display over 107% of the AdobeRGB standard. For editing images at 200 nits or so this will work well.
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semo - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
You guys need to concentrate a lot more on monitors that have DP. There must be plenty of budget displays out there with DP so why do you keep choosing the ones without!SteveTheWalrus - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
this one was supposed to, but didn't...and why should they focus on DP anyways, at least for now its not very common.
mczak - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
This monitor has 4 inputs, but only one is really useful for driving it at native resolution (it may or may not work over the VGA inputs but clearly you don't want to do that, and while 2560x1440 is doable over hdmi with newer hdmi standard I've yet to see a monitor which can actually do it, not to mention on the graphic card side almost noone can do it neither). Plus DL-DVI gets out of fashion too - new amd graphic cards only have one such port, not to mention for instance intel igps whose dvi outputs are never dual-link and can drive such resolutions only over DP. So for a monitor of this class the input options are not really useful.Not that it matters, the broken brightness handling (inability to control backlight, which both leads to bad picture and higher than necessary power draw) completely disqualifies this device to be taken seriously anyway.
cheinonen - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
Right, while the HDMI 1.4 standard allows for higher resolutions, the main issue is that lots of the transmitter chips don't have support for that resolution in them, so most vendors are then stuck designing their own chip (expensive) or sticking to lower resolutions over HDMI. Now that ATI and NVIDIA are supporting it, I'm guessing we will see support for it over HDMI in the future.Menty - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
I've yet to meet a single person who uses DP for connecting their machine to their monitor - and that includes Mac users. Most of them use mini-DP to HDMI/DVI converters. DP is just a fad, no doubt once Apple comes up with the next "best interface ever", it'll disappear like all the others.Fleeb - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
How is DP a fad?"...doubt once Apple comes up with the next "best interface ever"..."
You mean like Firewire?
Kaldor - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
I had to laugh when you said this.I have a buddy who is a PC user but is going to school for graphics design, video and such. The instructors swear up and down that he needs a Firewire external HD because the all macs have Firewire ports. His home PC does as well, but as I explained to him, he would be screwed if he needed to hook up to any other PC that doesnt have Firewire. I strongly urged him to buy a USB3 enclosure, and tell the instructors to pull their heads outta their ......
mtekr - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
... and now all the portables, minus the 17" MBP, have USB3.futurepastnow - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - link
And the "Retina" Macbook Pro doesn't have a Firewire port at all.Bownce - Thursday, June 14, 2012 - link
THUNDERBOLT!