14 DAY TRIAL // Monitors used by professional photographers and video editors, as well as game designers, need to be a step or two above the norm when it comes to pixel density and color accuracy. HP's new DreamColor Displays must be ten steps above though.
A “normal” consumer monitor has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and the ability to display 16.7 million colors.
Color-critical displays multiply that number by several factors, but HP's new DreamColor LCDs take the cake thanks to their palette of 1.07 billion on-screen colors.
In other words, the color accuracy is very high even for this category (color-critical LCDs), three times better than the previous generation of DreamColor units in any event. There are up to 60% more pixels too, as they are up to 57% thinner.
In terms that photographers will best understand, the color gamut coverage is of 100 percent of sRGB, 100 percent of AdobeRGB and 99 percent of DCI-P3.
You can even create a custom color space in which you have full control over tone response, white point and color primaries.
Moreover, you don't even need to be in front of the monitor to do it, because HP implemented Ethernet-based remote management with an integrated web server that provides unprecedented control of the display.
Furthermore, with the press of a single button, you can switch between several presets, like sRGB D65, sRGB D50, Adobe RGB, BT.709, BT.2020 and DCI-P3.
All in all, as long as you run a PC with Windows, Mac or Linux operating systems, the new monitors will let you work and connect to existing workflows.
Then, there's the HP Night Vision interface, which will even let you enable an auto-fade feature (there's a button for that).
Finally, the HP DeamColor displays have 4K resolution support (3840 x 2160 pixels). They more or less couldn't get out of this, because otherwise the pixel density and 4,000 percent increase in the internal color palette wouldn't have been feasible, and the same goes for the 60% increase in pixel number.
There are two new HP DreamColor monitors: DreamColor Z27x (27-inch, priced at $1,499 / €1,499) and the DreamColor Z24x (24-inch, $599 / €599). According to HP, these tags are a fourth of what the price of the original DreamColor display was. All in all, not bad considering that the duo are supposed to be 57 percent thinner than the previous generation of DreamColor panels as well.