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

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  • willis936 - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    With that many pixels I'm sure it would be an anomaly to get a new display without at least one dead pixel.
  • meacupla - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    and here I thought 2560x1440 27" was already very crisp.

    I guess they are sticking to 27" to keep costs down?
  • ddriver - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    Actually that resolution at that size makes up for quite big pixels, at least compared to what we got used to seeing on mobile devices. I've been furious for years that lousy phones got high density display while professional grade monitors were still jagged by huge pixels, but I guess the yields were still not quite there yet to produce big displays with high density. Or maybe they figured they will make more money out of booming mobile devices, now that the frenzy has settled and production has ramped up, they started devoting to big monitors as well.
  • Aguirre - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    you're furious? lol
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E
  • CaedenV - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    but we don't need the same insane cellphone densities for a desktop monitor to get the same clarity. We typically hold our phones 1-2' away from our eyes, while desktop monitors tend to sit 2.5-5' away. This basically means that we can get the same sharpness with 1/2 of the dpi of a phone. Anything in the 100-150dpi range is already a 'retina display' for most desktop use.

    I would personally like to see some larger 36-42" desktop monitor displays in the 4-5K resolution range. I am sure we will eventually see some smaller 4K TVs that would fit this bill... but they would likely be horrible quality compared to something labeled as a 'monitor'
  • seapeople - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    You sit 5 feet away from your desktop monitor?
  • boozed - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    The 2560x1440 of Dell's standard 27" Ultrasharp is already fairly close to the limits of human visual acuity at normal viewing distances for a monitor of that size, but if they could bump it up to perhaps 3200x1800 in a future generation, it would be just about perfect.

    I can probably think of a few interesting use cases for a "5K" monitor, on the other hand.
  • hrrmph - Wednesday, October 22, 2014 - link

    Uh no. I have one and it is very visibly "sandy."

    I was expecting 4K to hold us over until 8K, but this 5K thing is looking more like where things are heading for the pro-sumer.

    It would be nice to see what NEC could build with one of these panels.
  • tyger11 - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    They probably didn't have much choice as to what size display, since they're gluing two panels together. They don't make their own panels, so they have to use what's available, like almost all monitor makers.
  • erikloman - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    Come on! I'm not gonna watch movies on this thing. Please make a 16:10 screen!

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