Thanks. Unfortunately anecdotal evidence/responses are rife on the internet, but not useful unless the dice roll in your favor.
My gut reaction as well. But after reading this person's posts on the colorsync mailing list and checking his profile, he seems competent (very) and rational. Maybe he has very strict criteria.
But serial failures, sometimes on a large scale, aren't uncommon. I've seen about a hundred dead WD drives of the same model (factory contamination), roughly the same number of IBM drives fail (glass platter unstability), most HP and Samsung 30" monitors, including mine, seem to have failed (capacitors with insufficient temperature rating/lack of ventilation), scores of ASUS dead motherboards (bad capacitors from the same supplier), etc...
Remember the 5DMKII serial failures reported here after the Antartica trip: it first seemed that the 5DMKII was totally unreliable. After that initial hiccup, the camera seemed to do quite well.
It could be that NEC received a batch of substandard parts such as sub-par LVDS cables and corrected it. That would be consistent with a bad batch.
I am currently using a PA271w and am relatively happy. But I have seen a couple with localized color casts as well. I chose NEC because out of the 50 monitors or so I purchased over the years, 2 out of 3 EIZO failed and none of the NEC (I still have a functional Multisync 3D, useless, but happily clunking).
