[Confirmed] First HP, now Dell offering IPS option. Lenovo?

[gaphic2]

Clutching at straws there to diss the panels, Oliver. They aren't made by Dell anyway but most probably the new range of IPS panels from LG.
For me color depth is far less a professional issue than the distortion from limited viewing angles.

[Oliver26n]

Clutching at straws there to diss the panels, Oliver

I've had uniformly bad experiences with Dell. Mostly caused by their crappy system software, but that's all you have to work with. Truth is that all professional monitors, AFAIK, are 30 bit or better. I see no compelling reasons to choose the Dells over the HP's, especially if the pricing is similar.

[Troels]

I see that. It's on the new M6600 and M4600. Not on the 4500 or 6500. However, I read somewhere that these will be 24 bit displays. All true professional imaging monitors, including the Dreamcolor 2 on the HP, are capable of 30 bit color or better. I believe some of the EIZOs can do 12 or 14 bits per channel. Remains to be seen how good these displays really are. I have nothing but bad memories on the Dell Controlpoint software; I would much rather have a 15" W-series from lenovo with a IPS color-managed type display. Unless they have changed something, the Dells also scratched really easily.

I don't know the Dreamcolor 2 laptop display, but i would have a hard time imagining why it wouldn't just feature a 10 bit look-up-table for more accurate calibration. With such a large gamut, 8 or 6 bit is just would not cut it. What is actually displayed is more likely to be 8 bits though.
The Eizo monitors (VA or IPS) also feature a 12 or 14 bit LUT for calibration purposes, but it can "only" display 8 bit per color. As far as I remember, the DreamColor desktop display features a 8 bit per color panel, but it uses A-FRC to gain a "pseudo" two more bits of color per primary color.

And not to "diss" the trend of wide gamut IPS RGB LED displays. But 95% of applications are not color managed, so the wide gamut would cause the image to be over-saturated - unless you can hardware calibrate the display (i.e. access the LUT and tell what portions to use). Using the LUT of the video card is just wrong. The vast majority of users just need an sRGB color gamut (72% of NTSC) while the remaining would prefer AdobeRGB (92% NTSC).

[gaphic2]

@ Troels
You're absolutely right.

@ Oliver2n
For what it's worth:

PremierColor-supported Dell Precision laptops offer over 100 percent color gamut with true 30-bit color depth, which supports over 1.07 billion color palettes.