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Croatia, Zagreb
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Review on Dell UltraSharp U2515H 25 Inch LED Lit Monitor: Crystal Clear Display and Superior Performance by Motivation Harper

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Clear and crisp. Absolutely amazing screen.

(NOTE: This review is for the 25-inch Dell UltraSharp U2515H.) Absolutely stunning display. 1440P on a 25" display offers a slightly higher PPI than most traditional 1440P panels, which are 27" monitors. I use this monitor on two PCs, my Windows 10 gaming desktop and my 2013 Retina MacBook Pro for work so I know what the experience is like on both Windows and Mac OS X. This monitor is indeed the best of both worlds. fantastic viewing angles, as you would expect from an IPS display. I like that the screen is flush with the frame, so it doesn't sink into the frame like many other monitors. This makes the text and content on the screen I'm not complaining about the black level, it looks like a very dark shade of grey. My previous TN panel may have handled blacks a little better, but this screen makes up for it. In many other areas, I'm not a photographer or video editor. tor, I use this screen mainly for video games and programming, but the color accuracy seems very good to me (in my opinion). The ultra-bright TN panel that delivered colors needed a little tweaking, but I now prefer the panel's more accurate color reproduction. The whites are very light, but they have a bit of warmth, which I actually like because they're a bit prettier on the eyes. Also very minimal highlighting of highlights in my experience, everything around the panel is AWESOME. The only thing I don't like is the touch buttons. They work most of the time, but it usually takes at least two clicks for them to register my touch. At 2560 x 1440, you're actually getting twice the resolution of a standard 1080P HD screen. This monitor is basically a "2K" panel, or half the effective resolution of a 4K screen. Because of this, you still get a noticeable increase in pixel density compared to a 1080P screen (especially on a 25-inch screen), and while it's not as sharp as a 4K screen, it does tax your GPU compared to it 4K considerably less screen. This allows you to play most modern games at 60+ FPS at full 2560x1440 resolution if you have a modern mid-range graphics card (GTX 970, RX 480, GTX 1060, etc.). You can't hope to match that frame rate with a 4K screen since you're driving twice as many pixels. Response time was not a problem for me. I honestly don't notice any difference between a 2ms 60Hz TN panel and an 8ms 60Hz IPS panel. However, I don't tend towards hyper-competitive online gaming. Windows side works great with this monitor right out of the box. Windows 8 and 10's built-in scaling automatically chose 125%, which I've stuck to. This will scale or "enlarge" UI elements to make them more visible due to the increased resolution (which can make things appear small). While you can use Windows 10 without scaling, I found text to be too small on some websites and some apps. A system-wide 125 percent scaling seems perfect for this screen, as it increases the user interface enough to make it more comfortable to view, while still giving you a little more room to work than 1080p while maintaining perfect sharpness. NOTE. If you have problems with Google Chrome scaling, go to Chrome properties and disable UI scaling for Chrome. The Mac side is a little different. By default, Mac OS X (10.11 at the time of writing this article) only supports scaling for Apple displays. Because of this, you are basically stuck at the full 2560 x 1440 resolution. Of course, you can change the resolution to 1920 x 1080, but that only lowers the system resolution, making everything blurry. I suspect that like me you bought this monitor because you wanted a clear picture. Although a resolution of 2560 x 1440 can be used, I have to squint when reading text on certain websites and in certain applications. I found a solution online that allows Mac users to get OS X to support scaling for third-party displays. Just google "high resolution for non-Apple display" and click on the Reddit post that appears. This should take you to the "tonymacx86" website which describes how it works. It's a bit technical, sorry, but suffice it to say I was able to get OS X 10.11 to scale the U2515H to 1920x1080 in HiDPI mode, so I didn't lose the clarity of that 1440p display. While the UI isn't as crisp as Windows Scaling, it's a definite improvement over the default 1920x1080 resolution. While I wish there were other resolution options for more space, I've only been able to get two to work - native 2560 x 1440 and 1920 x 1080 in HiDPI. Unfortunately, we Mac users seem to be limited to those two options for now, until Apple decides that not everyone is willing to shell out $1,000 for a Thunderbolt display. My MacBook's iGPU (Intel Iris 5100) does a good job of driving this display, but sometimes it lags a bit with windows open or minimized when a lot of things are running. I'm running my MacBook on this display, a 20-inch secondary monitor at 1600 x 900 while also running the MacBook's built-in Retina display at 2560 x 1600, so in my particular case I'm putting quite a large pixel load on the iGPU. Your results may vary. I love this monitor so much I'm saving my money to replace my old Asus second screen and get another one. This is a very good buy, I highly recommend it!

img 1 attached to Dell UltraSharp U2515H 25 Inch LED Lit Monitor: Crystal Clear Display and Superior Performance review by Motivation Harper



Pros
  • Dell
Cons
  • Bad contrast

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