If you love Dell monitors because of the unmatched picture quality they provide, then you are going to love the new Dell UltraSharp U3011 Monitor. Since 2005 with the launch of the 2405 FPW, Dell has never stopped surprising its followers. The U3011 is simply the best 30” Monitor seen to date. Not only does it deliver excellent performance (as expected from a display running at 2,560×1,600 resolution), but it also has a lot of connection options and a richly featured on-screen display (OSD). Let’s take a look in detail.

The magnificent Dell U3011

Design

The 30” UltraSharp U3011 takes nearly everything great about its little brother, the U2711, adds three inches to its screen size, increases the already high resolution and features even more OSD options. Considering that most 30” monitors are limited to brightness adjustment controls, the U3011′s full array of OSD options is unusual.

A row of five vertically arranged buttons are positioned along the lower right-hand corner of the bezel, but they remain unseen until you press the one that lights up when your finger gets close. Each button corresponds to a menu command that pops up on the screen when the buttons are illuminated, making it easy to navigate through the various settings. Once a new menu is selected, the function of each button changes dynamically, the top two buttons becoming the up-and-down arrow buttons that navigate through the current menu. Since any button labels for the OSD are actually on the screen (instead of on the bezel), calibrating the display in a dark room is easy.

The OSD menu options include the standard brightness, contrast and various colour controls. The latter include custom controls for gain and offset, allowing you to adjust the red, green and blue values in the brighter and dimmer sections of the screen respectively.

The OSD Menu Options

There are eight picture modes (Standard, Multimedia, Game, Movie, Warm, Cool, Adobe RGB, and sRGB), each of which loads preset colour, brightness, and contrast settings that are optimized for specific applications. Standard is the best mode for everyday use, while the Adobe and sRGB modes emulate their respective colour spaces. You can adjust sharpness and set the OSD to stay on-screen up to a minute (useful for anyone who spends a good amount of time calibrating), as well as alter the OSD transparency level.

The 20 pound cabinet is attached to a stand that offers height, tilt, and swivel adjustability, but as with the U2711, you can’t pivot the screen. The stand matches the cabinet’s black and silver colour scheme and is very sturdy, and it has a square cable organizer cut into the mounting arm that helps keep cable clutter to a minimum.

Connectivity

The Dell UltraSharp U3011 has a host of connections making it one of the most robust monitor connection arrays ever made. The left side of the cabinet holds two USB ports and a flash card slot that reads SD, xD, Memory Stick/Pro, and MMC media. At the rear of the cabinet you’ll find just about every type of A/V input you’ll need, including two HDMI and two DVI (dual link) ports, a DisplayPort jack, a VGA port, three USB ports (one up, two down), component video inputs, and audio jacks that can be used to connect to an external speaker system.

The Dell U3011 Connectivity

Performance

Cnet.com tested the U3011 via its DVI input, connected to a Windows Vista PC using the included DVI cable. Here’s what they said:

The U3011 displayed excellent color reproduction and accuracy. It got high marks in the color tracking test, making better than its competitor, the HP ZR30w, which showed evidence of a green push. In the greyscale bars test, the reviewers spotted dark grey down to level 2, two levels above black, which indicated accurate black-level performance. The U3011 performed well in the uniformity and dark screen tests, showing only a minimum amount of backlight bleed-through. Unfortunately, as with the ZR30w, there was clear evidence of static streaking. Static streaking occurs when there are large changes in contrast and either the darker or lighter color ‘streaks’ onto its counterpart, showing, for example, black bars on a white background. They tested the monitor in a few standard modes:

Text
There was no colour problems with black text on a white background, and fonts were clearly visible down to a 6.8 point size.

Movies
Using the Blu-ray version of Avatar, they saw deep blacks, and accurate colour that looked great on the huge 30” screen.

Games
StarCraft II (SCII) is their favorite tool for judging colour quality and vibrancy in games. It’s difficult for a game running natively at 2,560×1,600 resolution to look bad, and SCII looked duly stunning on the U3011. As on HP’s ZR30w, the colours and vibrancy on the U3011 are second to none, and everything looked detailed and popped from the screen. The U3011 got the performance edge here, however, as the presets and colour calibration options allow for more detailed tweaking of the output. They also used DisplayMate’s Motion tests and found that the U3011, with its 7 ms refresh rate, produced noticeably more streaking than the Samsung PX2370, which runs at a 2ms refresh rate.

Photos
The Dell U3011 delivered clear photos with good colour saturation and accurate color tints.

Conclusion

Like most IPS-based monitors, the U3011 is geared towards professional use, for which accurate colour reproduction is required. Thanks to its robust assortment of OSD options, it should satisfy most professional graphic artists. Of course, if you have the finances, the U3011 is also great for watching movies, playing games, viewing photos and for general use.

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about how Yelp does its business.

In a statement on the company’s blog, Yelp has said it will now let anyone see reviews that were previously hidden by its automated filter, while in addition it is getting rid of the ‘favourite review’ option that it sold to advertisers. As a CNet report notes, both features have been the object of criticism in regards to the legitimacy of its user reviews.

“Today we’ve taken steps to make it even more clear that Yelp treats review content equally for advertisers and non-advertisers alike and that there is no relationship between advertising and a business’ reviews on Yelp,” Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s chief executive officer and co-founder, said in a statement.

“While Yelp is helping millions of consumers find millions of great local businesses each month–and consumer traffic and business advertisers continue to reach new highs–myths have persisted about how review content is displayed on Yelp,” he added.

The company had set up its automated filter to specifically remove reviews that were considered fake, malicious, or questionable in some way. But because the filter is automatic, legitimate reviews have ended up getting tossed aside as well. In response, the company will now offer links to a separate page showing all of the filtered reviews for a business.

The company has adamantly denied repeated suggestions that it gives more prominence to positive reviews of businesses that advertise on Yelp and that it removes positive reviews of businesses unwilling to advertise with them.

Yet, Yelp is currently facing a class action lawsuit filed in late February by a veterinary hospital in California, in which the hospital is claiming that Yelp sales reps asked for advertising payments in exchange for removing negative reviews – a charge that Stoppleman has wholeheartedly denied. However, since the original lawsuit was filed, nine other small businesses have joined in on the legal action, accusing Yelp of “extortion and fraudulent business practices”.

Troubled times ahead it seems.