DoubleSight DS-277W: Back to the Drawing Board

I own a 26” Doublesight display that we have used for years and it has served us well. Because of that experience I came into this review with high hopes for how the DS-277W would perform. Unfortunately from the time I hooked it up to the time I boxed it up for return, it was an overall disappointment.

The heavy duty case design is nice and cool at first, but unlike the NEC display where the case is designed to allow for incredibly even backlight uniformity, the DS-277W seems to be designed to be industrial looking more than anything. More annoying was the fact that with this huge display there was nowhere to put an internal power supply, side mounted USB slots, or make the video connectors more accessible. I continue to not be a fan of touch sensitive controls on an LCD, or having arrow buttons that control both up and down, then left and right. With all the space on the DS-277W they could have easily installed a 4-way D-pad.

The 200 nits calibrated numbers were good, but moving beyond that was risky as the brightness control didn’t work properly for a computer monitor. The combination of these incorrect controls could make it easy to lose black or while levels, and there was no way to adjust the backlight that I could find aside from the brightness setting. The contrast ratios only ranged from decent to awful, and the dynamic contrast was so easy to watch in action that it would drive me crazy with its pulsing in daily work.

Finally the plethora of video inputs proved to be less useful as the HDMI crops off pixels, and the component video didn’t work for me. I’d happily remove these to instead gain a DisplayPort interface, since that is becoming more and more common and works with high resolution displays much more easily than DVI. I really don’t understand the lack of a DisplayPort connector, and the webpage at the DoubleSight website even claims the display has one!

In the end the DS-277W was the first monitor that truly disappointed me in my reviews at AnandTech so far. Most displays might not be for everyone, but there is a user category that they would work for. With the DS-277W I really don’t know who that could be. If you want a cheap 27” display, buy the HP ZR2740w or one of the Korean import brands if you are willing to gamble. If you need a lot of video inputs on your 27” display, the Dell U2711 has all of them available and actually performs well for around the same price.

Hopefully DoubleSight can go back to making monitors like the DS-263N that are high quality and high value, but at least with this display they have lost that distinction. They need to fix the OSD controls so that proper backlight intensity adjustments are available, allow better control over scaling (and over/underscan), and create a better user interface. Once that's complete, DoubleSight should ditch the current industrial design and create something more with the times. When there are so many better options for the same price or less, there's just nothing here worth buying right now.