The Dell UP2718Q is a 27 inch professional 4K HDR10 monitor, and although it’s still
early days for HDR monitors this one seems to be one of the better options currently
available, so let’s take a look.
As mentioned this is a 27 inch monitor with a 16 by 9 aspect ratio and runs with a 4K
resolution, so 3840 by 2160.
As it’s a panel for professional users, it doesn’t have a lot of gaming specific
features like G-Sync or FreeSync.
The panel also runs at 60Hz, same as all the other current 4K monitors out there at the
moment.
The panel also has a 6ms response time, so again, not as fast as other gaming monitors
I’ve reviewed but for a professional tool I think this is fine.
It’s got a typical brightness of 400 nits and has a peak brightness of 1000 nits in
order to support HDR content, if you manually put the brightness on full it gets seriously
bright, way too bright.
It achieves this with 384 separate dimming zones, and when viewing HDR content this is
what allows different sections of the monitor to get brighter than darker content.
This does have the issue of displaying artifacts around brighter areas in dark scenes, for
example just moving the mouse cursor on a black image we can see the dimming zones lighting
up for it, but like I said this only happens in the HDR modes, and it’s not actually
too bad while watching a movie, but it will depend on the content.
It’s also an IPS panel, and to me the colours look amazing.
One of the first things I noticed when I turned it on was just how different colours looked
from what I was used to.
In terms of colour accuracy, Dell note that the monitor is capable of 100% sRGB, 100%
AdobeRGB, 100% Rec. 709, 97.7% of DCI-P3 and 76.9% of Rec. 2020 with support for 1.07 billion
different colours.
In my own testing I can only really test sRGB and Adobe RGB with the Spyder 5 Pro, as that
seems to be all the software supports, I don’t have a more professional tool, and these are
my results while testing with the standard, adobergb, and srb presets.
The panel also has a 1000 to 1 typical contrast ratio, or a 20,000 to 1 contrast ratio in
HDR.
This was my first time with a HDR monitor and viewing HDR content, it seems like the
software side has a bit of catching up to do.
To watch 4K netflix HDR content I had to install the Netflix app as it’s not supported in
the web browser, and then manually enable HDR in the Windows settings, and you can only
really leave the HDR mode on when you’re going to view HDR content otherwise the colours
will look washed out.
There isn’t much HDR capable content available at the moment yet either, as it’s still
early days, and just watching in HDR mode I didn’t easily notice a difference at first.
It was only when I paused what I was watching, disabled HDR and compared the two together
that I noticed the difference.
I chose a particularly dark scene, and without HDR it’s fairly difficult to make out much
of the detail, but with HDR enabled a lot of the darker areas are boosted and easier
to see and the colours seem a bit better too, so my first impressions were that it’s a
nice extra but I wasn’t blown away by it, at least with the content on Netflix I was
testing with, it’s possible the difference in other things is much greater.
I didn’t notice any changes even when looking at the screen on sharp angles, Dell list that
it’s capable of 178 degree viewing angles both vertically and horizontally.
I’ve also performed my usual backlight bleed test, which involves having the screen completely
black in a dark room to help emphasize any bleeding.
I then take a long exposure photo to display any bleed, so this is a worst case scenario
test.
As you can see it’s basically fine, to my eyes even in the dark room it looked perfectly
fine.
It’s not all just about the panel though, taking a look at the rest of the monitor it’s
got a silver plastic stand with a circular hole for threading cables through.
The stand can also be removed, revealing a standard 100mm VESA mount if you want to attach
it to something else.
The bezels are fairly thin, just under a centimeter based on my own measurements, and down the
bottom there’s a silver Dell logo.
Both the stand and display together weigh in at around 11.5kg, while the panel itself
weighs just under 6kg if you plan on mounting it.
The power button and 5 additional buttons for navigating the on screen display are found
underneath the right hand side, and I found the OSD extremely easy to navigate through
with these.
There are a fair few options, and you can change through the 7 image presets, I spent
most of my time using ColorSpace, which you can then use to swap between 5 colour calibrated
presets, and even save two of your own.
This worked well for me as I mostly used the monitor to edit videos, but I also found movie
mode to work well while watching some TV shows.
There are quite a few options too, you can even choose if USB should be on or off during
standby and disable the power button LED.
You can also connect a second video input and use picture in picture or picture by picture
modes, as I’m demonstrating here with a laptop.
You can take this a step further too, and even use the monitor like a USB KVM, so one
keyboard and mouse for two systems.
The back of the monitor is a matte plastic, silver for the most part and then darker towards
the bottom, nothing fancy going on here as I’ve come to expect from Dell monitors,
just a clean professional look.
The IO is on the back toward the bottom and faces down.
There’s an AC power input, two HDMI 2.0a ports, DisplayPort 1.4, Mini DisplayPort 1.4,
3.5mm audio out, 2 USB type-B connectors which plug into your computer and allow you to use
the following two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, and there’s two more USB 3.0 Type-A ports on
the left hand side which are easier to access if you need more.
As for the included cables you get a HDMI cable, DisplayPort to Mini DisplayPort cable,
and USB Type-B to Type-A cable for connecting the monitor to your computer, and the power
cable, no external power bricks here.
The stand is fairly big and does a great job of preventing the thick panel from moving
around, even while bumping my desk.
As for the overall dimensions, the whole monitor, so panel attached to stand comes in at 62.7cm
in width, 20cm in depth, and 41.3cm to 55.5cm in height depending on what you set it to.
There’s a fair bit of adjustments available too, with -5 to 21 degrees of tilt, -45 to
45 degrees of swivel, 14.5cm of height adjustment with enough tension so that the screen actually
stays where you leave it, and 90 degrees of clockwise pivot.
So far the monitor looks pretty good, but how was it to actually use day to day?
This was the first time I’ve used a 4K monitor for an extended period of time, overall I
liked the extra screen real estate and it was useful in just about all tasks from browsing
the Internet to editing videos.
Especially as I work with 4K video now.
I don’t personally do anything day to day that involves HDR content, so outside of specifically
trying that out it wasn’t something I regularly used, but having the extra brightness options
and high levels of colour accuracy was greatly appreciated, if you’re a content creator
or someone who uses their monitor in a professional capacity this looks like a great option.
As for gaming, if you plan on playing games at 4K you’ll need a seriously powerful graphics
card to actually push that many pixels, 4K at 60Hz equates to just under 500 million
pixels being displayed every second, crazy stuff!
I’ve previously compared the Nvidia 1080 against the 1080Ti and included 4K benchmarks
in that video if you need to get an idea of which you need for 4K gaming, although it
depends on your game the 1080Ti is currently the best, and of course most expensive option.
I’ve also used the monitor to edit my last few videos and that was excellent, this is
by far the most colour accurate monitor I’ve ever used, and it’s made me realise how
useful it would be to have for video editing going forward so I’ll be keeping that in
mind when I look at upgrading my own monitors in the future.
As for the price it’s going for about $2200 AUD here in Australia, or around $1,400 USD
on Amazon for my international viewers, so although it might seem quite expensive it
actually seems to be pretty well priced considering all of the professional features that it’s
packing.
So what did you guys think about the UP2718Q monitor from Dell?
Overall I thought it was a great monitor for professional use, it’s got excellent colour
accuracy and it looks great.
If you’re after a gaming monitor you’ll probably want to look elsewhere though.
With a lack of HDR support and content out there at the moment it’s difficult for me
to really talk too much about it other than the experience was lacking, however it’s
still pretty early days for HDR monitors and content, and it feels like the software side
of things is also playing catch up, so things should improve in the future.
Be sure to let me know your thoughts down in the comments, and leave a like if you found
the information useful.
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one.