As you can see from the display comparison above, the increased brightness and color gamut in the current generation comes at a cost of high response times. Also, as noted in our reviews of the XPS 13 9370, the reduced display lid thickness makes the whole display fragile and needs a glass cover to ensure rigidity. This could be the reason why there are no proper matte displays in this generation.

HDR displays not too far off

Our conversations with panel manufacturers during Computex 2018 also lead us to speculate that we might start seeing HDR panels in the next generation XPS series. Back during CES 2018, we saw Lenovo introduce the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and the ThinkPad X1 Yoga with support for Dolby Vision HDR displays. Generally, most laptop displays are LCD panels with LED backlighting, which does not bode well for very high contrast or high luminance dynamic range. Although OLED panels are inherently capable of HDR, very few laptops such as the Alienware 13 R3 have actually adopted it. We, however, did not get any hints of OEMs switching en masse to OLED or HDR-enabled displays just yet.

VESA has recently come out with a revised specification called DisplayHDR v1.0 that specifically addresses the needs of PCs and laptops incorporating LCD displays. Aside from mid-range (DisplayHDR 600) and high-end (DisplayHDR 1000) specs, the baseline DisplayHDR 400 comes with a minimum luminance requirement of 400 nits on a true 8-bit display, which is feasible in a laptop. On the software side, Windows 10 has gained better support for HDR with the April 2018 Update making it highly plausible that HDR on laptops is actually not too far off.

We hope Dell does incorporate a matte display option and better response times in whatever panel it chooses for the next generation XPS 13. Although the HDR capability is still anyone's guess at this point, having the option will surely gratify the senses of potential buyers.