Info Stay away from Dell HDR Monitors

[digitalgriffin]

I purchased a Dell U2518D monitor back in September. It has listed on the box and spec sheet HDR.

HOWEVER it's Dells implementation and it's NON HDR-10 Compliant. What this means is windows will NOT recognize it as being HDR capable. It's highly unstable in this regard. Turning Smart HDR on post boot, and windows refuses to see HDR. However rebooting it with Smart HDR on will make it black screen with no way to recover easily.

To make matters work, if you turn on "Smart HDR" windows will black screen on you during reboot. It also locks up a lot during some games that use HDR. The only way to fix it is to turn the Smart HDR off before boot.

It makes the HDR component utterly worthless in all scenarios except where you connect something like a HDR BluRay player via HDMI 2.0 to the monitor where the player ignores the monitors capabilities. (Provided the BluRay player doesn't disable HDR10 meta data because the monitor refuses to respond to HDR10 Queries properly) Netflix, for example, refuses to stream HDR data if it can't detect an HDR display.

The fact they skirted the HDR10 spec and labeled their product as having HDR is just deceptive in my book.

I would grant this monitor a FAIL ranking due to it failing to meet advertised specs in a reliable manner.

 

[gn842a]

That's good to know but hard to remember, unless HDR fails to work in Dell across all lines. I'm very fond of my Dell 1080 p have had it for years and would like to think Dell makes other good monitors. But I wouldn't be surprised if that is a fantasy.

Greg N

 

[digitalgriffin]

That's good to know but hard to remember, unless HDR fails to work in Dell across all lines. I'm very fond of my Dell 1080 p have had it for years and would like to think Dell makes other good monitors. But I wouldn't be surprised if that is a fantasy.

Greg N

I've isolated the problem down to Dell not supporting HDR on DP. And HDR over HDMI requires HDMI 2.0a. Most cards only support HDMI2.0 (NON a) This creates problems when you try 1440p and try to go higher than 8bpp 4:4:4. HDMI 2.0 just doesn't have the bandwidth. So it causes the screen to drop out in a lot of cases. Even though HDR10 is just meta data, which gets passed with 2.0, it needs the bandwidth support. Most of the time 10 bit color by default. This is why some games work and some don't. Those that check the compatible display modes work, but the color is severely faded and dull do to 4:2:0 or 4:2:2 chroma down sampling so that bandwidth is maintained. Others try to force a 10 bit 4:4:4 (like windows start up) and it just craps out.

Seems to be a universal problem with all the Dell models to date. So it looks like a useless feature used more for a marketing checkbox.

 

[gn842a]

Well I will try to remember to avoid Dell unless this problem is fixed. Makes me want to stick to what I've got. I really like my Dell monitor.