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dell u2718q 27" 4K monitor ultrasharp review

Review: Dell UltraSharp 27″ 4K U2718Q Monitor

One of my favourite things to review at the moment is monitors. I think it’s because they are so sophisticated now and with each new one that I try, there’s a new feature or development that can take me by surprise. I’ve been given the chance to try the Dell UltraSharp U2718Q 4K Monitor. I was sent a sample for return so my views have been based on my experience of using it for two weeks.

dell u2718q 27" 4K monitor ultrasharp review

 

The Dell UltraSharp U2718Q is the world’s first 27″ 4K monitor with Infinity Edge and Dell HDR. Infinity Edge is basically what it sounds like. It’s a display without any borders, so the image fills the maximum amount of space on the device and HDR or High Dynamic Range refers to the range of colours used in the images displayed. The tagline for this device is “Productivity Without Boundaries,” which is a really bold statement and it tells you right away that this is a monitor to which you should pay attention.

In order to use the 4K Monitor I had to team it with a device that was appropriate so I also tried the Dell Precision Tower 7910 workstation. This is one of the most powerful workstations on the market and it has dual Intel Xeon Processors. It can accommodate up to four graphics cards and has optional RAID for up to eight hard drives.

dell u2718q 27" 4K monitor ultrasharp review

Being 27″ across, this is a good size for anyone who is using software for video editing, photography, graphic design or simply for watching movies. It’s obviously not portable at this size and it’s much heavier than I had expected it to be at 9.4kg so it’s definitely a monitor to set up exactly where you need it to be. The bezels are extremely thin, so although I only had one monitor set up, I could imagine that if you needed to have two or three, this would be an ideal choice since it has almost no borders.
dell u2718q 27" 4K monitor ultrasharp review
The image quality projected is outstanding, and I don’t make that statement lightly. I can’t call it realistic because you don’t naturally see that much detail. I used it to watch some nature documentaries online because it seemed the best way to gauge how it displays colours, shadows and detail. It was like having the image right in front of me, but with a magnifying glass! I watched a clip of a stoat and I could see every shade of brown, every bristle on its body and every shadow the blades of grass cast. It can show 1.07 billion colours so it will be possible to see every shade imaginable of every colour. I was literally shocked at how good the picture quality was and based on that alone, I would recommend this monitor. The 16:9 LED screen comes with an anti-glare hard coating, so there’s no off-putting reflections spoiling your view. Obviously if you shine a torch right at it, you’re going to see some distortion but I found that for normal use, sunlight or the artificial light in the room doesn’t affect the picture quality.
dell u2718q 27" 4K monitor ultrasharp review
There are a lot of connectivity options, so no matter how you want to use this, it can team up with your chosen piece of equipment. It has a standard AC power connector and an HDMI connector, a DP and an mDP connector, an audio line-out port, a USB upstream port, a USB 3.0 downstream port and another USB 3.0 downstream port with BC1.2 charging capabilities. It comes with a power cable, a USB 3.0 cable and a DP-mDP cable.
dell u2718q 27" 4K monitor ultrasharp review
It also comes with a stand which is sturdy, despite being very thin. The screen can tilt, which is handy and I didn’t encounter any problems with the strength of the stand at all, although with the stand being so thin and the monitor being quite heavy I was apprehensive about tilting it too much in one direction.
As for the Precision Tower 7910 workstation, I found this to be a really powerful piece of equipment. It’s designed to tackle complex applications with ease and deal with intensive workloads such as simulation and analysis without slowing down. The Precision Tower 7910 features an integrated 12Gb/s RAID Controller which provides double the I/O speed of its predecessor. It has the Dell liquid cooling options to keep it running at maximum performance levels without overheating. It does give off some heat, so it’s best to use it in a cool environment such as an air-conditioned room and certainly not anywhere that will not be ventilated.
dell precision tower 7910 workstation
It features the latest NVIDIA Quadro and AMD FirePro graphics which again are ideal for tackling intense tasks that require some serious power. It can handle up to 675W of dedicated graphics power. They also offer larger graphics memory and the system memory is expandable up to 1TB4. This uses 2400MHz DDR4 ECC memory technology. Sadly, I wasn’t undertaking any huge jobs that could put that to the test during the two week period but I can say that no matter what I worked on, there was no loss in speed and no system crashes. This Workstation has a RRP of £2790 and is ideal for those who are serious about video editing or who run power-hungry applications on a daily basis.

The Dell UltraSharp 27″ 4K U2718Q Monitor is currently priced at £725 on the Dell UK website for the monitor, stand and the cables mentioned above. It comes with a 3-year warranty. You can also buy a security lock slot and an anti-theft stand lock slot separately. I didn’t get to sample those so I can’t comment on them but it seems prudent to take some security precautions since this is obviously an expensive piece of equipment and if I had this in my home permanently, I would want to invest in those.
Have you tried this monitor? Let us know your thoughts!

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6 thoughts on “Review: Dell UltraSharp 27″ 4K U2718Q Monitor

  1. In the review entitled ‘Dell UltraSharp 27″ 4K U2718Q Monitor”, it was stated that the screen is 27″ wide. That is incorrect. According to Dell’s website, its diagonal dimension, not the width, is 27″.

  2. Dell U2718Q’s weight mentioned in the article is meant to be 6.23kg with stand assembly without cables, 6.55kg with stand assembly and cables according to Dell web site. 9.4kg is the weight with packaging.

  3. I’ve bought 6 of these monitors directly from Dell in the last 3 months. 2 of them have failed already. Problem seems to be with the full DP port, not the display electronics. In 30 years of buying Dell equipment, and Dell monitors when they started selling those, I’ve never had failures within the first two years of operation.

    Each time I go thru the same dance with Nvidia to trouble shoot because I use 4 monitors on one card. Then I go thru another hour with Dell.

    Not worth buying Dell monitors no matter how good the specs if they have design problems like this.

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