3. First Impressions

I spent time with a pre-production version of the new DreamColor monitor at an HP event that took place at DreamWorks’ headquarters in Glendale, Calif., and I didn’t have the opportunity to bring the monitor back to Tom’s Guide headquarters for full testing.

An HP DreamColor demo station

That said, I was able to discern a few things about the DreamColor that aren’t immediately obvious upon reading the spec sheet.

HP employees manned a booth that demonstrated the differences between a DreamColor monitor paired with a 10 bit ATI graphics card and one paired with a 8 bit standard graphics card. But the demonstration was only in grayscale and didn’t fill up the full screen.

What I saw was two windows: One showed a textured grayscale field marked with ridges. These artifacts are known as banding, but what they really looked like to me were the outlines of the deepening of color shades on a map showing ocean depth. That, or an oil spill. The other window showed smooth transitions between shades of gray, without much noticeable banding. The difference would’ve been more notable had the demonstration been in color; after all, the most important feature of a billion-color monitor would be seeing how well it processed all that information. Again, without the right graphics card, the transitions between shades can look choppy and pixilated.

HP also demonstrated its new monitor on a desk shared with a 23" Apple Cinema Display ($899). HP could have chosen to compare the DreamColor with one of the NEC, Sony, or Samsung RGB LED monitors, but it did not. I don’t think the Cinema Display — a favorite of amateur photographers and Web publishers — is targeted to the same market HP hopes to reach.

In comparison to the Apple Cinema Display, stock outdoor daylight photos on the DreamColor monitor appeared brighter, with deeper colors. Reds were extremely saturated, showed more texture and fine patterns, but skin appeared to have an un-natural glow (skin looked a bit too sun-kissed, and too smooth, on the DreamColor). However, the Cinema Display appeared washed-out and did appear to display fewer colors. It wasn’t exactly a scientific test, especially since I don’t know what settings were chosen for the Cinema Display, but it was evident that the DreamColor was brighter and could display a richer, wider variety of colors.

DreamColor Vs. Apple Cinema Display

To my eye, the most impressive comparison constructed by HP was color-matching between the HP monitor and a large-format color photo printed right next to it (from an HP printer, of course). An image of a sailboat docked near a bright blue ocean and under a cloud-speckled sky, when held up next to the monitor, could hardly have been more identical, color-wise.

Andy Bowen, a product director for commercial displays at HP, was on hand during my visit with the DreamColor. He acknowledged that the company has plans for a DreamColor product line that will fill out over the next six, 12 and 18 months. Not all DreamColor-infused products will come close to the $3,499 price point of the new monitor, which signifies that HP knows consumers won’t come near that price for a monitor.

Would a consumer even recognize the impressive technology built into a DreamColor if he saw it lined up at an aisle in Best Buy? “An average consumer would probably need to be directed to it,” says Bowden. “The consumer market needs to be educated. But they’ll notice that wider color band.”

While LED backlighting may not make its way into a more consumer-focused monitor, some aspects of the DreamColor technology could be spread into lower-end products — think of it as DreamColor DNA.

DreamColor’s branding logo: Look for it on future HP products.