Review Dell UltraSharp U4919DW Monitor Review: Two 27-inch QHD Screens in One

abryant

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May 16, 2016
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Tired of the bezel line between your two 27-inch QHD screens? The Dell UltraSharp U4919DW is the perfect solution. It’s a gently curved 49-inch panel with 5120x1440 resolution and precise color. Read more here.
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CHRISTIAN EBERLE
@ceberle

Christian Eberle is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He's a veteran reviewer of A/V equipment, specializing in monitors.
 
For $600 I got a Dell 27" QHD Gaming Monitor (144hz with G-SYNC) and a Dell 27" QHD UltraSharp Monitor (IPS) and the stand to mount them to my desk side-by-side. It would take one hell of a gaming rig to push these 7.2million pixels onto that monitor and, if you have the rig to do it, why would you game on that (No G-Sync, limited to 60hz)? Hard to justify that price in my book when I have all the real estate, great gaming, and the same number of pixels for less than half the price and from the same manufacturer.
 
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Good grief. These super-turbo-ultra-got-your-daddy-wide (STUGYDW) screens are getting ridiculous. At least for gaming. I can see them being useful for business for certain productivity applications where massive side scrolling or 3-4 windows up at a time would be useful. But for gaming? No way. Even 21:9 to me looks like peering out of a tank peep hole: very little vertical viewing aspect. It is even worse for race simming or flight simming where you need to pan around for in cockpit gauge monitoring or in the case of flight simming, actually clicking switches. This thing has an insane stretch 32:9 aspect ratio! And that brings me to the point Christian missed here:

Many prefer to run two or three monitors to multi-task or increase the size of their gaming environment, and while this is a practical way to add screen area, there is always a pesky black bezel between those panels. Even the thinnest black border adds at least 0.5 inches to the screen and spoils the wraparound effect when flying a simulator or fragging your way through distant battlefields.


^^Yeah except 2560x1440 monitors tied together are still in the game 16:9 aspect ratio each for normal vertical viewing instead of pinched, nearly shut eye, 32:9 ratio. That's all assuming game support is updated with this latest STUGYDW resolution. On top of that there HAS to be some screen wobble in aggressive gaming like using a strong force feedback wheel on the desk with it. I'll stick with three 27" 1440p $375 60Hz Dell monitors for less* for gaming and pocket that $235, thanks. Regarding the bezel split, if you are hard core enough and don't care about warranty destruction (and know what you are doing), you remove the bezels and go glass-to-glass-to-glass for near seamless integration minus the thin lines where the edges are not being lit. Modders have been doing this for years for their multi-displays, but ASUS is the first to officially support it:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12326/asus-at-ces-2018-how-to-remove-multimonitor-bezels-safely

*That includes the $140 cost of TechOrbits' 3-way monitor mount.
 
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It's like having two 27 inch monitors for the price of four! : P

Good grief. These super-turbo-ultra-got-your-daddy-wide (STUGYDW) screens are getting ridiculous. At least for gaming. I can see them being useful for business for certain productivity applications where massive side scrolling or 3-4 windows up at a time would be useful. But for gaming? No way. Even 21:9 to me looks like peering out of a tank peep hole: very little vertical viewing aspect. It is even worse for race simming or flight simming where you need to pan around for in cockpit gauge monitoring or in the case of flight simming, actually clicking switches. This thing has an insane stretch 32:9 aspect ratio!

Assuming the game supports ultrawide and multimonitor setups properly, increasing the horizontal field of view while keeping the vertical the same, then just as much should be in view vertically as on a standard 27" 16:9 display. And on that example of three 16:9 screens, you would actually have an even wider 48:9 aspect ratio (technically wider still, due to bezel compensation).

I think the idea of a super-ultrawide aspect ratio for gaming is fine, so long as the screen is priced accordingly, and large enough that you are not sacrificing vertical screen real-estate to get there. At 21:9, you need a 30" diagonal screen size to nearly match the height of a 24" screen, and 34" to match a 27". And at 32:9, it would need to be 43" to nearly match the height of a 24" screen, and 49" to match a 27". Diagonal measurements can be deceptive for screens with wider aspect ratios, and it would be nice if companies dropped that way of measuring screen sizes. They should have actually done that back when transitioning from 4:3 and 5:4 to 16:9 though, and that didn't happen. Obviously it's more marketable to describe your 32:9 display as being 49", when in terms of area it's similar in size to a 38" 16:9. It's worth pointing out that Dell has a 43" 16:9 4K IPS display that is around 25% larger in terms of area and has 12.5% more pixels than this one. Despite being larger and having more pixels, it's currently priced in the $900-$1000 range at most online stores, and is just $768 at B&H right now...

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/3zfmP6/dell-p4317q-425-60hz-monitor-p4317q

While their features look fairly similar based on a cursory glance, that screen apparently came out a couple years ago, so perhaps this one does feature some improvements over it. I'm not sure I see much to justify the significantly higher price though.

As for business use, I'm not sure there would be much advantage in going for this over two 27" 16:9 panels. It's not like having bezels between them would make much of a difference. For gaming, you would otherwise need three panels to avoid having the split directly in the center of your view, but that shouldn't be much of an issue for most other tasks.

And for general entertainment use, you would end up with some rather large black borders to the left and right when viewing 16:9 video, and the resulting area in use would only be as large as a single 27" 1440p display. Whereas, if one went with something like that 43" 4K panel I previously linked, a 16:9 image would cover an area about 2.5 times as large and with significantly higher resolution. A 21:9 screen would at least be close to anamorphic widescreen used by many films, but 32:9 would only fill half to two-thirds of the screen with just about any video content.

So, I would say this aspect ratio would likely be relatively good for games (at least those that support arbitrary aspect ratios), not ideal for video, and of questionable benefit for business use. As a gaming monitor, this screen lacks some things like variable refresh rate though, which one might expect on a gaming-oriented display, especially anywhere near this price range.