Dell XPS 15.6" QHD+ (3200x1800) | Hacker News Reader

Dell XPS 15.6" QHD+ (3200x1800)

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56 pointsbellwether80 comments

For the love of all that is good in the world, please give us this kind of pixel density in large form-factor desktop displays already. I tweet at Dell periodically pleading this case, but it's always crickets.

Every time I see a high-DPI portable device, I long for my preferred consumption and creation context (desktop) to get some needed love from manufacturers.

(Yes, my wife has a Seiki 4K and I have several 30" 2560x1600 monitors, but I want better. The 30" form-factor is from 2004! These displays are the equivalent of a Motorola RAZR flip-phone.)

Edit: see my spur-of-the-moment review of the Seiki lower in this thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6631442

I couldn't agree more.

1920x1080 is more than enough on mobile phones and I don't use tablets or laptops so I don't care about them.

Where are the 23" (give or take a few inches is fine) 4k displays?

Thats what we really need, a high ppi screen for something I stare into for hours a day.

What I still don't get is how the 30" Cinema Display was released in 2004, and almost 10 years later we still have pretty much the same same resolution screens.

I know 4k is slowly hitting the market, but you think about 10 years ago in the mobile world, we were using 84px monochrome screens on our Nokia 3315's.

And also why is the price difference between a laptop screen and a desktop screen so massive? You can buy a 4k screen complete with a whole computer for $1500, where a 4k desktop screen is going to cost you almost twice that.

By the same token, why the hell are $1000 projectors still 800x600?

They're not. At all. The Optoma HD-25LV goes for under $1200 and does 1080p natively. I have its big brother, the HD-33 (1080p + 3d), and it's fantastic, especially considering that it was only $1700. Projectors have gotten really good and really cheap.

With projectors, lamp technology hasn't advanced all that much, so brightness is important, and is inverse with resolution.

quite a few 1080p under 1k. For example the excellent Benq w1070 ..

The Seikis almost sound too good to be true. I'd try one out in a heartbeat if they'd come down a notch in size to ~27 or 30in so I could actually fit it on my desk.

http://www.amazon.com/Seiki-Digital-SE39UY04-39-Inch-Ultra/d...

e- just did the ppi calculation and it only comes out to 113, so probably not what I'd call "retina" quality

My wife has one. Here is an ad hoc review!

Upsides:

1. Yay, it's 2007 finally, and we have more than 2560x1600 in a desktop display!

2. Jokes aside, 3840x2160 is fairly breathtaking. It is quite choice. If you have the means...

3. Only $700. Sure, that's still not as low as a 3840x2160 display would be today had the living room television not converged with the desktop computer monitor, infecting our workspace with the taint of HD. But it's not $4,000, so that's something to celebrate. And, lo, it's cheaper than a name-brand 30" display. It makes me want to shake Dell, HP, and Samsung fiercely until they admit they've been price-fixing 30" because desktop-be-damned.

4. It's sufficiently large to be nearly immersive, which is something I really want for my desktop environment. I want to be able to completely fill my field of view with very high-density pixels. VR goggles need not apply, yet.

5. It's fairly lightweight and thin. Something bothersome about desktop monitors is that, unlike televisions, they are manufactured with serious heft. Nothing about an LCD should require a four-inch cabinet depth, but there it is in every one of my U3011s. For shame, Dell. The Chinese have shown you up. Of course all laptop displays since the early 2000s have done the same.

6. The bezel is fairly trim at about 1.5cm. Trimmer than my U3011s.

7. While it's glossy, it's not offensively glossy like some consumer monitors.

8. 3840x2160 for $700. Why not, right? Right. RIGHT.

Downsides:

1. It's a television. It's got speakers. Yeah, no kidding. And a remote control! Very well, I'll just stow that in a drawer somewhere. But more onerous than these features I'll never use are the "features" that are not features at all, such as a 5 second SEIKI splash screen when you turn on the monitor. No, monitor, don't do that to me. Just wake up and let's get to business. Oh, I forgot, you're a television. That also explains why you just turn off when you lose the signal on the HDMI connector, not to re-awaken when the HDMI warms up again.

2. It's a Seiki. Yes, they deserve huge amounts of credit for kicking the collective ass of the incumbent manufacturers. Thank you Seiki! But also, it means it's not exactly the finest engineering around. The backlighting is uneven and the materials are second-rate. The back is utilitarian. Incumbent manufacturers at least fashion some fairly nice looking plastic bits and bobs on the back side of monitors. But so be it. I'm not buying the monitor as a piece of furniture.

3. The power buttons are very crunchy/clicky hard buttons on the back side. Since you have to click one of those every time you sit down (due to HDMI not awakening the monitor), I worry that eventually the button will break.

4. Most importantly, it's HDMI 1.4 and not HDMI 2.0. This means at the showcase 3840x2160 resolution, you're going to get 30Hz—30 frames per second. This causes a notably sluggish feeling to animation and mouse control. It's serviceable for getting work done and consumption of Facetube content. My wife doesn't play games, so she is tolerating it. If Seiki drops HDMI 2.0 into a next-generation of this monitor, I'm grabbing one.

5. Yeah, it's 39". I'd prefer to see this resolution at something closer to 30", thereby increasing pixel density. Better still, I'd like a 50" display that cranks something closer to 8,000 by 5,000. I can dream, no?

6. Windows 8.1 is NOT (I cannot emphasize this enough) engineered to work with high-density large form-factor desktop displays. Metro apps are a joke on my 30" displays and they're a tragedy on my wife's monitor. Metro Skype at 39" is ... I am at a loss for words ... you have to see it to believe how idiotic it is. Further ranting at [1]. Similarly, it's not touch-enabled.

7. It's glossy. Matte for life!

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft

Because most consumers decided that if it played HD movies and was cheaper than the adjacent unit, they would buy it.

I am not sure you can say this when nobody ever even manufactured such a screen as an experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

You don't get it because you are tracking resolution without regard to the panel size. Large standalone panels cost more and have a smaller market than laptops.

The 2004 30" Apple Cinema Display was 98.44 PPI and cost $3300 at launch. Today that same $3300 buys you a 31.5" 4k monitor at 140ppi. I wouldn't call that "pretty much the same resolution".

I do get it. In theory you would think that a bigger screen with pixels further apart would be cheaper to produce than a small mobile screen with double the ppi.

I figured out this Dell screen is 235 ppi so pretty similar to Macbook and other 'retina' equivalent laptop displays.

And I was comparing the current 27" 2560x1440 Cinema Display to the 30" 2560x1600 Cinema Display. The ppi increased a bit, but it is essentially "pretty much the same resolution".

That's a little unfair, considering the current 27" display retails for less than a third of the 30" model.

The fact of the matter is that manufacturing large, high-resolution displays is expensive, and that's due to a number of factors: the limited market for high-end desktop displays, the 2-4x increase in subpixel failures as resolutions scale 2-4x, and Windows.

Now that 4k tech is figured out, and Windows is no longer a complete failure at scaling to high pixel densities, expect the market to increase and prices to fall accordingly.

There is almost no content for the "big" devices available (TV, PC etc.). At least no content which is important enough for people to change, everything is centered around 1080p atm and the majority of people are just adapting this (upgrading their "hd ready" tv, new consoles, switching from dvd to blu ray etc).

Also it's coming to devices which don't have to rely on 3D performance. It is an astronomical hit rendering on such high resolution, because you still need anti-aliasing.

If only Lenovo would take notice and see what is happening in the market. I really want a better screen on my Thinkpad with a higher resolution.

It would better if Lenovo could provide better screens for the whole laptop product line, including Ideapad and stuff.

If you can live with a buttonless clickpad, the ThinkPad 9 Slim is what you want: 13", 3200x1800.

See martey's comment above.

The T440p, T540p, and W540 all have buttonless clickpads too, and the latter two are so huge they have numpads; anything from the W series is Way too heavy anyway. The L and E series are out because I'm looking for a high-end system, and in any case they have buttonless clickpads too.

The upcoming generation of ThinkPads generally has better screens (either higher resolutions or IPS instead of TN) than before. In particular, the W540 is supposed to have an IPS screen with a similar (2880x1620) resolution:

http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=1717

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/w-series/w540/

Awesome. Thanks!

Does anyone have any experience using hi-res screens with linux? If so, what are the issues, if any ? Is there a distro that has really good support for these kinds of displays?

I know the laptop comes with Win 8.1 which supposedly has decent hi-res screen support but if you wanted to wipe windows and put a Linux distro, which one would be best?

GNOME 3.10 has great support for high-DPI displays. Non-toolkit fixed-size apps will tend to look small, but any modern app will look great.

GNOME 3.10, as another poster said, is absolutely fantastic with high-DPI screens, and looks fantastic. The scaling is finally down.

Only works with GTK at the moment, but if you're using GNOME shell, you probably are only mainly using GTK apps anyway.

Will there be a manufacture that will make: QHD+ (non touch), Intel everything (graphics, NIC), ultrabook body, I5-I7 with at-least 8GB of memory and hit the price point of 1000USD?

Non-touch seems like it's becoming less and less common with Windows laptops. I imagine Microsoft has been pushing pretty hard for it since Windows 8.

I don't even care about that price point either, I'd just like that feature set, a and mouse buttons. Far too many new laptops are putting in buttonless clickpads, which might work fine if you only need one mouse button but which are unusable if you use three.

My ideal laptop would be the ThinkPad 9 Slim (13", 3200x1800), with its TrackPoint, but with actual buttons to go with the TrackPoint. Or, to look at that another way: the X1 Carbon with a 3200x1800 or better screen.

Probably not. Intel charges a large premium for its crystal-well parts. Here are tray prices: http://ark.intel.com/products/codename/51802/Crystal-Well

Im sure they get discounts... but how much can it be?

https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/daru4

with the exception of the touch screen, which you can pretend isn't a touchscreen.

What? 1920x1080 is nowhere near QHD+.

That one is only 1080p.

Oh just give me one in 13" (Project Sputnik!) and I'm IN!

It seems the 13" has been discounted. (at least in australia)

Ive always been thinking of buying one in the back of my mind. Do dell support linux well in the XPS line?

xps 13 hasn't been discontinued; it was refreshed last month at the same time as the XPS 15 shown here.

Barton George, the project lead, has confirmed that there will be a follow-on Sputnik coming out sometime in the next month. This (long) thread has the information, especially on the last few pages. http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/f/46...

Sorry I said discounted.

Thank you for the link. Sadly Australia never saw the edition which shipped with Ubuntu, but I'm fine with that as long as i know the hardware supports it.

I appreciate the DPI wars coming to laptops, next up is monitors. I'm friends with the owner of a local computer store chain and he says he sells 100 "low dpi" (aka 1080p) screens for every higher dpi screen. It doesn't make sense for him to stock them at those rates, and the cost difference is quite high because the 1080p screens are basically cheap TV glass rather than non-volume computer glass. (same issue with getting a 1920 x 1200 screen).

I've ordered a couple of the Asus 4K screens from him to try out but man $3500 (4K) vs $350 (1920 x 1200) vs $150 (1920 x 1080). That doesn't sound like a sustainable market to me.

Meanwhile, I still can't buy a 2560x1440 monitor at less than 27". Rediculous.

Yeah, but its a Dell laptop.

Do they still come covered in Windows stickers and with all sorts of bloatware installed?

Do people similar to you in audience type really run the copy of Windows that comes with their laptops?

Or, perhaps, does the ordinary folk/gamer care about bloatware on a laptop this fast, with i5/i7 and 16GB of RAM?

My MacBook is littered with source code, and I run the copy of OS X that came on the machine. Futzing with OSes is for kids and a product that requires you to do so is a bad product.

There is exactly one vendor with an OS worth using which builds hardware worth using. The rest of us who are not so lucky to get an integrated offering have to futz around and make do with what we have.

Modern laptops occasionally have lots of add-on hardware that requires the OEM's software to work (3G modem, webcam, thumbreader, occasionally wifi, etc).

That might be fine if you're buying a Dell. They're easy to get drivers from. (Though, who else has had to deal with those handful of Dells that required a custom Dell build of the Intel PROSet/Wireless software to work? -.-)

But if you bought an ASUS? With the Impossible Website From Hell? HELL NO! Anyone who has had to download a driver or firmware update from their sites will tell you just how unpleasant the experience is (if they can even do it). I swear their webserver's connection to the outside world is a 14.4 modem.

Running a non-ADK/OPK'd Windows install on a modern laptop reminds me a lot of running Linux on a laptop or OEM desktop 15-20 years ago. Hey, anyone remember how fun winmodems were?

It's just not worth the risk. For me, laptops without Apple branding haven't been a sensible choice in a long time, and there was a good half-decade before that where the only serious manufacturer made ThinkPads.

People in my audience don't buy windows laptops :).

If I have to run windows, its in a VM, and only for cross browser testing purposes.

This looks like a good guy! Anyone know about linux support?

its an lintel processor with integrated graphics (for base model), shouldn't be a problem

Has the secure-boot stuff been fully sorted yet?

oh, that didn't cross my mind, I'm not sure actually

On most systems it can be disabled in the BIOS; not sure about this exact model.

UEFI "Secure Boot" is not an issue; you can always turn it off on any x86 system, by design requirement, and several current Linux distributions support booting even with it turned on.

On the other hand, "fastboot" can be an issue: many current Windows systems skip the BIOS screen and don't support USB boot, on the assumption that you'll use the Windows option to shut down and boot into BIOS setup. That option doesn't exist in the Windows setup UI those same systems boot up into when you first get them, thus forcing prospective Linux users to disassemble the system and disconnect the disk to trigger BIOS setup.

See http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/24869.html

The base model doesn't have the 3200x1800 screen; the model with that screen only has nVidia graphics, and I don't see any option to customize that, so no. No idea if it works with the nouveau driver or not.

ever try windows with hi-dpi? I did about a year ago, surprisingly flakey. has the situation improved?

At what resolution does hi-dpi start?

anything not 1:1 basically. once you start scaling up resources / fonts / reporting pseudo-pixel positions you start running into problems.

Whatever you want to call it, I suppose. I don't think the Windows 8+ features are resolution-dependent. There's a new slider in the display control panel that lets you set the scaling factor. Windows 8.1's main change was adding a checkbox that lets you set a different scaling factor for each screen, and you can choose a custom scale, not just 1x/1.5x/2x.

Windows 8.1 claims to have improved support for high DPI:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Defrag-Tools/Defrag-Tools-62-...

After upgrading to 8.1 on my retina mac, I haven't found it much better than 8. Changing the DPI settings still breaks stuff until you logout, plenty of icons are still blurry, IE's support is buggy, and third-party app support is still scarce (e.g. Chrome is a no-go).

I'm really excited to ser Dell pursue this new direction instead of lowest-common-denominator.

Hope they got the touchpad right. None of the win8 laptops/ultrabooks so far match macbooks.

I have the previous generation aluminum XPS 15 and its trackpad is the best I have used on any PC laptop so far.

The laptop is basically a Macbook Pro clone and the trackpad holds its own. It's the solid build of a Macbook Pro minus the (unwanted) Mac experience. The only place it really falls short is battery life.

The trick is to disable the gestures in the Synaptic driver and install TwoFingerScroll. Once you do that, the trackpad feels just as smooth as a Macbook.

I really wish some of these high resolution laptops came with equivalent high end video cards to drive that resolution ... shipping with a 750m rather than the 780m seems nuts, it is 2 to 3 times slower and when you got 5.5+ million pixels to drive...

The 780m is a huge power draw. It's basically a minorly downclocked GTX 680, with all of the performance (and heat) that implies. It's estimated to draw 122W at maximum, for crying out loud! It probably won't be fitting in a .7" laptop anytime soon.

Aside from that... This laptop isn't intended for gaming. Honestly, I'd think that if Intel HD graphics can drive an rMBP display, then the 750m will suffice for this. Though I would love to see QHD+ come to some of the gaming laptop lines...

Never an XPS, again. Ever. XPS is the short name of Dell misunderstanding gaming laptop.

This is an otherwise good choice that I'd consider for my next laptop if it wasn't for no dedicated Home/End and Page Up/Down buttons.

Would be nice if this became their Linux dev box, and they had an external monitor to match.

Nice. Finally some decent Windows notebook screens.

Being touch, I guess it is glossy and not matt?

Dell XPS 15.6" QHD+ (Late 2013): 235 dpi

13" rMBP (Late 2012): 226 dpi

I don’t see why you’re comparing it to last year’s 13" MacBook Pro.

The new 15" MacBook Pro has specs that are very much like this DELL laptop. Same screen size, same resolution. Same SSD, RAM, and GPU. The MBP has a slightly faster CPU, i7 2.3Ghz instead of DELL’s i7 2.2Ghz. The DELL is 10% cheaper.

The 15" is slightly less DPI. I was only comparing DPI because, to be honest, every laptop I've ever used that wasn't a Thinkpad or a Macbook has left me wondering whether I should just use pen and paper instead.

> The 15" is slightly less DPI.

The DELL has a 15.6" screen, the MBP has a 15.4" screen. The screens both have the same resolution and aspect ratio. That means the MBP’s screen has a slightly higher DPI (221 versus 218).

They don't have the same aspect ratio. The Dell is 16:9 while the rMBP is 16:10. They don't have the same resolution either. The rMBP is 2880x1800 while the Dell is 3200x1800.

I wonder if a $150-savings is worth having to put up with Windows 8.

Windows 8 and Valve's upcoming Steambox are the sole reasons I am no longer considering PCs in my upgrade options.

> Windows 8.

You don't have to. Linux...

Not even an option worth considering, IMO. And that's with 10+ years experience with Debian/Slackware/Arch that I'm saying that. I've run the above as my primary desktops for years but they still aren't ready for primetime (for both getting work done and for entertainment). That goes triple for laptops.

I was dragged back to the Windows world with Vista and 7 because it was obviously more efficient with my time. Last year I purchased a mac mini and it has completely taken over as the machine that I get all of my work done on. Easily five times more efficiently than any other platform. My Windows machine does nothing more than store media and play games. The next computer I buy is going to be an rMBP, I have no doubt.

And before someone eventually brings up Ubuntu, it's a joke and a toy OS that's suitable for hobbyists and old people. I wouldn't suggest it to anyone who wants to actually learn Linux.

A fresh install of MacOS is probably 90% of the way ready for me to do everything I need. Getting it the other 10% there takes less than 2 hours. Tops. Windows (any flavor) starts at maybe 30%. Closing the gap is easily a full day. Getting a Linux system up and running properly takes a weekend, taking time to do everything the right way. It's worth it, no doubt, but requires much more effort to properly administer. My time is way too valuable for that.

I think it depends on proficiency with the platform more than anything. I've spent 8 out of the past 10 years with Linux as my laptop platform, the other two were split between Windows & MacOS. Both of those were huge productivity steps backward (big enough that 2 of those Linux years were from running Linux on a MacBook Pro!!). Ironically about half of the productivity loss was due to increased administration time. The only real win with the other platforms was somewhat better battery life.

Dell Inspiron 15" UXGA (mid-2000): 151 dpi

15.2" PowerBook G4 1152x768 (2001, updated in late October, same res): 91 dpi

Why is the M6800 not more awesome? 17" 1080p, only.

Yes but does it run OS X?

I’m pretty sure it runs Crysis. With a pitcher big enough, I bet it will blend. Also, it has wireless and more space than a Nomad.

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