Whilst Apple is touting the LG 5K UltraFine as the best choice for pro Mac owners today, Dell is launching a ‘5K’ display of its own … $5K that is. Leapfrogging the market, the UltraSharp UP3218K is the ‘world’s first’ 8K consumer monitor with an insane 7680×4320 resolution.

With a screen size of 31.5 inches, the IPS panel touts a 279 PPI pixel density easily exceeding the Retina bar for desktop computer displays (the 5K iMac has 217 PPI). Available to order now from Dell.com, it’s an amazing monitor (if you can ignore the hefty price tag).

Dell announced the display back at CES in January and has followed through on its promise of late March availability. If you have a spare $4999 to spend, you can order it today and own the world’s first consumer 8K monitor in mid April.

Obviously, the big draw of this monitor is the ginormous resolution. 7680×4320 means it displays more than 33 million pixels at a time with ample space to show 4 4K movies at a time. At 32 inches, it outstrips competition from the 27 inch 5K LG UltraFine monitor in both pixel density and physical size.

Of course, the panel itself is also rated highly with a myriad of other tech specs, including 1300:1 contrast ratio, 400 nit brightness and full support for Adobe RGB and sRGB color spaces. The panel is IPS just like all of Apple’s laptops and iMacs, so it features strong vibrant color and wide 178° viewing angles. It also displays 98% of the DCI-P3 color space for wide color photography and video.

Because a single DisplayPort cannot carry enough bandwidth to push 7680×4320 pixel buffers at 60Hz, to use the monitor you have to dual-link. This means plugging in two DisplayPort 1.3 cables; the monitor then stitches the two display streams together. As ever, living on the cutting edge means sacrificing some conveniences. For 8K monitors today, a single-port solution simply isn’t possible.

This 8K monitor is out of reach for most people today, with its $4999 price tag. However, it shows that the pace of innovation in display technology is not slowing down. Hopefully, prices of 8K monitors fall as fast as the cost of 5K and 4K monitors did. Expect to see 8K displays with realistic consumer prices in the not too distance future.

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