This 27" Dell monitor has a brilliant picture. Tiny fonts are very sharp and readable. Colors are accurate and very pleasing. Viewing angles are great, and no bad pixels. At 60 hz, everything is smooth. The bezels are small; I'm sure you can find monitors with smaller bezels yet, but these bezels are plenty small for me.
The monitor's stand offers a lot of adjustability. The screen can slide up or down, tilt forward or backward, you can turn the screen to the left or right without changing the position of the base, and you can rotate the screen 90 degrees to use it in portrait mode!!!
The monitor is like a powered USB-C hub for your laptop. I have connected the monitor to my printer, my external webcam, the USB dongle for my Logitech wireless USB mouse, and one or two other peripherals. Then I run a single USB-C cable from the monitor to my M1 Macbook Air. That cable brings power to my Mac, brings the video signal from my Mac to the monitor, and allows my Mac to communicate with the other devices attached to the monitor. I do not need to plug anything else into my Macbook.
I previously owned a 24" 4K Dell monitor, a 2015 model that served me well for 6 years. It still works, but I donated it to my local college. The new U2720Q is a substantial upgrade in every way, which is what you'd expect for a newer product compared to an older product. It cost me only $100 more than the 24" 4K Dell monitor did back then. For my needs, it's money very well spent.
There are very few downsides. The main one IMO is the unpredictability of the price. For a long time, it was around $675. I put it in my cart, so I'd be more likely to notice price drops. The price did eventually drop to $525, and that's when I bought it. A week later, the price was $550, and at the moment I'm typing this, it's $999!!!!
So my advice is, put it in your cart and wait for the price to drop to $500-550.
Another downside is that most of the jacks that you plug stuff into is on the bottom of the monitor. Easy to unplug cables, but hard to plug them in because you can't see the jack you're plugging them into. If you don't plug and unplug things into the monitor very often, this is totally not a big deal.
What else? It doesn't have built-in speakers. For me that's a plus, mostly, because my external computer speakers sound way better than any speakers built into monitors. The one downside is, if you plug an iPad into this monitor using HDMI to watch a movie or do anything else that involves sound, you should know that the iPad transmits sound and image over the HDMI cable, and the iPad cannot also output sound to any other device except bluetooth speakers or headphones. That's not the iPad's fault or the monitor's fault, it's due to HDMI. If you had a monitor with built-in speakers, you could output the picture and sound from a laptop, iPad, or other device to watch movies, youtube videos, etc without having to figure out a work-around to get audio. For me, not a big deal, but you should be aware if you want a monitor to play movies over an HDMI connection.
No monitor is perfect. This one is pretty darn close. Highly recommended - but don't spend too much on it, wait for the price to come down.
| Standing screen display size | 27 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 3840x2160 |
| Max Screen Resolution | 4K Pixels |
