UHD is dead. Not really, but it would seem that displays bigger than UHD/4K will soon be coming to market. The ability of being able to stitch two regular sized outputs into the same panel is now being exploited even more as Dell has announced during its Modern Workforce livestream about the new ‘5K’ Ultrasharp 27-inch display. The ‘5K’ name comes from the 5120 pixels horizontally, but this panel screams as being two lots of 2560x2880 in a tiled display.

5120x2880 at 27 inches comes out at 218 PPI for a total of 14.7 million pixels. At that number of pixels per inch, we are essentially looking at a larger 15.4-inch Retina MBP or double a WQHD ASUS Zenbook UX301, and seems right for users wanting to upgrade their 13 year old IBM T220 for something a bit more modern.

Displays Sorted by PPI Product Size / in Resolution PPI Pixels LG G3 5.5 2560x1440 534 3,686,400 Samsung Galaxy S5 5.1 1920x1080 432 2,073,600 HTC One Max 5.9 1920x1080 373 2,073,600 Apple iPhone 5S 4 640x1136 326 727,040 Apple iPad mini Retina 7.9 2048x1536 324 2,777,088 Google Nexus 4 4.7 1280x768 318 983,040 Google Nexus 10 10 2560x1600 300 4,096,000 Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro 13.3 3200x1800 276 5,760,000 ASUS Zenbook UX301A 13.3 2560x1440 221 3,686,400 Apple Retina MBP 15" 15.4 2880x1800 221 5,184,000 Dell Ultrasharp 27" 5K 27 5120x2880 218 14,745,600 Nokia Lumia 820 4.3 800x480 217 384,000 IBM T220/T221 22.2 3840x2400 204 9,216,000 Dell UP2414Q 24 3840x2160 184 8,294,400 Dell P2815Q 28 3840x2160 157 8,294,400 Samsung U28D590D 28 3840x2160 157 8,294,400 ASUS PQ321Q 31.5 3840x2160 140 8,294,400 Apple 11.6" MacBook Air 11.6 1366x768 135 1,049,088 LG 34UM95 34 3440x1440 110 4,953,600 Korean 27" WQHD 27 2560x1440 109 3,686,400 Sharp 8K Prototype 85 7680x4320 104 33,177,600

Dell has been pretty quiet on the specifications, such as HDMI or DisplayPort support, though PC Perspective is reporting 16W integrated speakers. If the display is using tiling to divide up the transport workload over two outputs, that puts the emphasis squarely on two DP 1.2 connections. There is no mention of frame rates as of yet, nor intended color goals.

Clearly this panel is aimed more at workflow than gaming. This is almost double 4K resolution in terms of pixels, and 4K can already bring down the majority of graphics cards to their knees, but we would imagine that the content producer and prosumer would be the intended market. Word is that this monitor will hit the shelves by Christmas, with a $2500 price tag.

Source: Dell