for the last few years the monitor industry has had a big hole in it. You can get monitors from 15 to 24 inches with progressively higher resolutions, but above 24 you just get bigger pixels until you get to 30 where a huge number of pixels and a price tag to match awaits.
Dell have brought out a new 27" monitor with a resolution of 2560x1440, capable of 10 bit colour and all sorts of other clever things. It uses the same panel as the 27" iMac, but different backlighting.
Its not cheap, but its less than 30" monitors... and at least now there's an option there.
Comments
10 bit colour? Isn't 32 bit colour what we want?
10 bits per channel, 30 bits overall. Standard monitors use 8 bits per channel, or 24 bits for the set, blus an 8 bit Z buffer = 32 bit for 3d purposes. Equivilant for this monitor would be 38 or 40 bit I guess...
Apart from TN panels of course, which use 6 bits per channel and temporal dithering (my speciality ;) ) to emulate the rest. Those old Hitachis were 6 bit panels, and I think the iiyamas we have might be too...
LOL! That's a superb description. Thanks! I feel like a right dunce now - hoping I'd caught you out. ;-)
That is a gorgeous panel; I've only seen it in the iMac, but it looks amazing there. Something to be aware of is that Apple have had real reliability problems with the display on the iMac 27". Mostly backlight related, to be fair, but a fair few related to spontaneous dead/stuck pixels as well. It'd be worth investigating what Dell's dead-pixel return policy is before investing.
@Rob - np mate, all part of the service ;)
@Aggo - Indeed. Probably not a short term thing for me anyway... and its always worth waiting for early adopters to find the issues