slawnick

Hi Mark - well, in my experience it's been flawless. I particularly like the built in KVM; I can actually hook up two computers to the monitor, and use the KVM to switch between them.

Those Dells are pretty steep. You might take a look at the BenQ PD3200U; I love mine. Runs about $800.

The 24" monitors. You'll see more screen real estate at that resolution.

Good advice; thanks.

Looking at 4K 30"+ monitors. Anyone have experience with the BenQ BL3201PH? Pretty great stats vs price.

2nd edition, possibly?

I know people who are quite happy with the Dell 30" models; also the HP Z30i. There are quite a few more models out there than there used to be. If you take a look at Newegg, you can see what's available, often with reviews. http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/ is a good site for info; as is http://www.flatpanelshd.com/

Why not a good 30" monitor at 2560 x 1600?

Need to emit light from a large (12' x 6') LED panel. Playing with the Area Light Parameters has no effect at all. Max Help says you need to run a Maxscript to "convert to area light" found in the Utilities tab; that selection does not exist there. But, according to Help, running that would get me the same control choices that the Area Light already offers. Am I missing something here?

ah, right....thanks

I need to make a niche; so I used a capsule primitive, and sliced it 180 deg. I end up with this nasty shadow as shown in attached pic. I know this must be some normals/smoothing issue, but I have not been able to figure it out. I've played with edit normals, to no avail. Any enlightenment would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Thanks; good to know. My Dell 690 has dual Xeon E5320's ( 1.8 GHz); how do you think that HP would compare?

Looking for a cheap second machine that I can add to a Dell Precision 690 to render farm with. I saw this refurb: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=XW8400-XN30X2-PB-2C&cat=SYS What do you think? Good value (assuming that it works, of course)?

I'm currently using a Quadro FX 3500 to run Max 9; and I am quite underwhelmed by it's performance.

You might check out the RPC shadow plugin; made to deal with these problems.