The ZR30W came in a nice thick quality well packed shipping box.
The Bezel around the screen is just a tad thicker than I was imagining in my head, just a few millimeters shorter than the LG W3000H. One positive to the HP bezel though is it's the same width on all four sides which is helpful if you ever want to do portrait multi-display.
The stand is nice and wide with a decent heft. Just plain matte black plastic, the LG's is a little fancier and has a piano black gloss base.
There is not as much vertical adjustment on the HP as I would have wanted. Especially for us taller people, it's nice to have a screen that can raise pretty high. The LG stand allows another inch or two height here, so the LG wins the stand department. Neither can do portrait mode, you would need a much beefier stand design to reach that tall.
The HP has a nice aluminum strip around the entire edge of the display , adding a nice quality touch. These 30" panels are very deep though, for multi-display gaming overlapping the displays bezels will be a bit tougher. I have removed the LG's bezel before and there was significant space savings to be had with the bezel removed for surround gaming. I haven't done this yet to the HP as to make sure I have a long term fully functioning display before voiding any warranties. Although if removed properly, i don't think the manufacturers could notice that the bezel was removed.
The HP has just 4 buttons out front, on/off, source and dim/bright buttons.The LG has a LED on/off toggle for the power indicator and a way to turn off the beeping sound as you make bright/dim adjustments. The Hp doesn't make any menu noise, it let's you know you have reached the min/max in brightness by simply blinking the power LED. The HP's power LED also goes off after a few seconds which I like.
On connectivity, the HP has the LG beat. The LG has a single DVI-D connector, while the HP has DVI-D and Display port. While I think DVI-D isn't going anywhere soon, it's nice to know you have the option for Display port if those future graphics cards are DP only. Both monitors have two under monitor mounted USB ports and two on the side.
My HP arrived with zero dead/stuck pixels just like my LG. It appears the quality control on these higher end panels is much more stringent over the cheaper panels. I've read a few reports of early ZR30W's exhibiting some sort of audible buzzing noise from the power supply when brightness was reduced. My HPZR30W is silent at any brightness setting.
Now for picture quality:
The instant I turned the ZR30W right next to my LG I could see there was an improvement in image quality. The LG uses the LG LM300WQ5 panel, but I believe the HP uses a newer revision of the basic LM300WQ5. I have not taken the monitor apart yet to confirm this. The largest difference that I can see appear to be the back lighting. The ZR30W exhibits much purer whites. You can really tell that there are some high-end wide color gamut CCFL's in the HP. The LG look's to have a greenish/tan tint to it compared to the HP. I cannot stress it enough how good the whites look on the HP.
For color reproduction in standard sRGB color-space, both are very similar. The HP might have a tinge more saturation or "pop" to the colors over the LG, which in itself looks very good. The TN panels next to the IPS look just dreadful in comparison.
Contrast ratio's are still very good, very similar between the LG and HP. Although, with the HP's purer white's, the contrast seem's more crisp in the transition from white to black. Pixel response times appear to be identical using test images. Ghosting to my naked eye appears to be identical to the LG, which never had a huge ghosting problem to begin with. These are quite fast IPS panels and to my subjective eye don't ghost any more than the Viewsonic 120Hz TN panel using the same test image.
Input lag appears to be imperceptible, just like on the LG. This is thanks to the lack of a scalar which I find a very good feature. I only run 2560x1600 resolution so I need no extra electronics that would add input lag. you would neither want the LG nor the HP for PS3/Xbox 360, but that's not what it's designed for. You would need a good test setup to accurately gauge input lag that is below one frame. Moving minimized windows quickly across the desktop cannot match the fluidity of the 120Hz panel, but that is expected.
Both the HP and LG can only do exactly 60Hz, sorry movie editing guru's. I've adjusting both manually and at different resolutions, but they both just go signal blank when fed a 50Hz signal.
In conclusion, I thought it was hard to beat the LG W3000H in image quality. The ZR30W has surpassed my expectations. The pure whites, excellent colors, limited ghosting and very low input lag make this the best display I have ever used. The LG is off to Ebay and my order for two more HP ZR30W's has been placed for nVidia Surround. The unfortunate side effect of going 7680x1600 3x 30" is that I realized I need a larger desk.
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