Dell Ultrasharp 40 Curved WUHD Monitor U4021QW
MORE VERTICAL RESOLUTION, MORE FEATURES AND OUTSTANDING PRODUCT QUALITY MAKE THE HIGH PRICE EASIER TO SWALLOW
Dell’s consistent ability to push the barriers of screen technology is pretty clear as soon as you set up the U4021QW. This £2,000-ish monitor is at the upper end of pricing, five times that of the AOC CU34P2A, but it outclasses every ultra-wide on the market in almost every respect.
The most critical example is the vertical resolution. The native 1,440 pixels that is standard on ultra-wide displays is not enough to display a 4K image. Dell has pushed through this limit, offering 2,160 vertical pixels, a huge benefit to all visual artists, for a full native resolution of 5,120 x 2,160 (5K2K).
Here you’re getting a middle-of-the-road screen size. 40 inches is definitely wider than you’re used to, but sitting in a goldilocks zone of desktop footprint, display real estate, and underlying technology.
Besides this, the U4021QW not only has all the bells and whistles typical on most highend displays, such as a KVM and fast charging over 90W Thunderbolt, but it also fixes all kinds of niggling issues that are common in a lot of screens.
For example, it’s refreshing that the speakers sound so much better than anything we’ve previously heard from a desktop display, besides Apple’s imac all-in-one. The interface is easy to navigate and cleverly thought out with a high-quality joystick for navigation. No stone is left unturned, so even settings like PIP (Picture-in-picture) have more options than usual and are tailored to the wide 40-inch panel you’ve paid for. And when using the KVM (perhaps with a laptop connected over Thunderbolt) you get a useful RJ45 networking port plus keyboard and mouse over USB.
There’s a small omission though. HDMI 2.0 does not have the bandwidth for a 5K2K native resolution image at 60Hz – so you’re stuck with 30Hz only. Either the Thunderbolt or Displayport inputs work perfectly fine, but HDMI 2.1 would have solved this. There’s also no VRR support for gaming.
What you’re not getting for this outlay is the same eye-popping colour that matches certain high-end 16:9 4K screens. The U4021QW absolutely ticks the colour accuracy box – we measured 94% DCI-P3 coverage, 100% Adobergb and 100% SRGB, with limited deviation across the panel. But brightness hovers around a middling 300 nits, and while contrast is fine it’s not outstanding. It is an IPS panel though, with better viewing angles, and this goes some way to explain the higher pricing.
So while the U4021QW is a great display for most usage scenarios, it costs a lot and since a standard 16:9 colour-accurate screen carries roughly the same sum, there’s a trade-off between paying for either extra pixels or the best possible image quality, but sadly not both.