For high-end content creators, making sure your work’s colors are on point is a never-ending battle. So to make things a bit easier, Dell has created what it says is the world’s first 27-inch 4K monitor with a built-in colorimeter and Thunderbolt 3.
Making its debut today at Adobe Max 2019, the $2,000 Dell UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor Monitor (UP2720Q) has a sky-high price and a mouthful of a name, but based on its specs, Dell may have hit a sweet spot between your normal consumer-grade monitors and super expensive reference-grade displays.
In addition to its built-in colorimeter, the UltraSharp 27 4K Premier Color is also a certified CalMAN Ready monitor and offers a huge color gamut that covers 100 percent of the Adobe RGB spectrum, 98 percent of the DCI-P3 spectrum, and 80 percent of the super-wide BT.2020 spectrum.
That means Dell’s new display should be a big help in creating content for the growing number of devices that support HDR. In some ways, you can think of Dell’s new monitor as a budget version of Apple’s $5,000 Pro Display XDR, because while Dell’s display is a bit smaller at 27-inches (versus 32-inches for Apple) and has a lower max resolution (3840 x 2160 versus 6016 x 3384), the Pro Display XDR’s gamut is only slightly wider with coverage of 100 percent of the DCI-P3 spectrum. Meanwhile, the UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor costs almost one-third the price and comes with a stand.
Another nice bonus is the inclusion of two Thunderbolt 3 ports with speeds up to 40Gbps and power output of up to 90 watts, which means Dell’s new monitor can power laptops like an XPS 15 or a MacBook Pro 15 without needing any additional cables. And with the monitor’s total number of ports including a one DisplayPort (1.4), two HDMI 2.0 ports, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and six USB 3.02 ports, there’s plenty of connectivity.
Dell even gave the UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor a special Picture-by-Picture mode that makes it easy to compared images side-by-side, so you can see how content will look in different color spaces or when piped in from different sources.
However, the one spec that seems a bit low is the UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor’s brightness, with Dell listing a max brightness of just 350 nits. That’s a far cry from the Pro Display XDR’s standard-def brightness of 500 nits and an even bigger difference from the Pro Display XDR’s peak brightness of 1600 nits. Despite the UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor’s focus on color, its low brightness means Dell’s monitor isn’t a certified HDR display.
If you are interested in Dell’s UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor monitor, you’re going to have to wait a bit, as it’s not scheduled to go on sale until January 15th, 2020.
[Update 11/5/19] After reaching out to Dell for more info, we’ve discovered that the UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor’s max brightness is 350 nits, which is better than its typical listed brightness of 250 nits, but still well below that of Apple’s Pro Display XDR.