Digital Trends

HP LP3065 July 5th, 2007 | by Ian Bell

Setup and Use 

Before you decide to purchase this monitor, understand that you will need a videocard that features dual-link DVI output if you want to take advantage of the 2560 x 1600 resolution. The GeForce 8500 and 8600 cards from Nvidia support both dual-link DVI outputs with HDCP compatibility. What this means is that you will be connecting both of the DVI outputs from your videocard into the DVI inputs on the LP3065 monitor. Once we plugged in the LP3065, we were ready to get started. 

We used the HP LP3065 with our Dell XPS 710 desktop sporting an Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS videocard. We noticed that occasionally upon boot-up, when the system is posting, the font and text get very blurry, to the point where you think the monitor is not connected to the system correctly. But once the Windows Login prompt shows up, everything is back to normal. Text and icons proved to be easy on the eyes, and very sharp-looking. Brightness levels are good for a 30-inch monitor, although not as good as HP’s own 24-inch LP2465 monitor. 

In our game tests with Word of Warcraft and F.E.A.R., the LP3065 put out some gorgeous colors that proved to be accurate and rich. Keep in mind that you will not likely be playing most games at this resolution, and even the most powerful graphics cards on the market will have trouble outputting consistently fast frame rates — at least for now. 

Images used in Photoshop CS were true to form with accurate color reproduction. When compared side-by-side with the HP L2045w, we found the colors to be a tad washed out. Even after changing the color profiles in Photoshop, we were not able to get the two monitors to duplicate each others colors to 100% accuracy using our test images; but they came pretty close. We noticed only minimal light bleeding on the right side of the monitor. Chances are that you may experience this sort of bleeding in different areas of the same model; and this is common in most monitors. Our review unit also came with zero dead pixels.

Although we did not have a Blu-ray or HD DVD drive to test with the LP3065, there are some things you need to be aware of. While the LP3065 does support HDCP over dual-link, we have been told that Nvidia’s graphics cards do not. And since we did not have an HD drive to test this with, we will have to update the article later once we can. In any event, this seems to be an issue with the videocard and not this monitor. (If you have some information regarding this issue, please post in our forums so others can hear about your experience.) We just used the DVD drive that came with our Dell test system and Cyberlink’s PowerDVD Ultra software for our movie testing. Colors again looked very rich, and black levels were acceptable. A lot of what you will see with the LP3065 will differ from our review, though, because color levels, etc. really depend on your videocard and system setup.

Image Courtesy of HP