Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Can we please stop talking about the freaking font on the keyboard? It is literally something that I've never heard someone talk about with respect to a laptop. I would be willing to bet that we wouldn't have wasted 3 pages on the topic if someone hadn't ranted about it earlier. I've never even noticed the font on a keyboard before because I basically never look at it.

They developed a machine with a high end quad core processor and discrete graphics that could serve as a high end personal laptop of or a thin and light workstation. I've never understood the sacredness of the precision name. Maybe this product isn't for everyone, but there is definitely a market and in my opinion, even though this looks like an xps I don't think it looks unprofessional at all. It's matte grey/silver with a matte black bottom. That doesn't exactly say gaming machine to me.

Sent from my ASUS Transformer Pad TF700T using Tapatalk 4

 

After reading some adobe forums it seems as if the only way to use their products at the moment on this screen is to lower the resolution. Nobody mentions the blur I have, is this an issue with my screen only? Can someone check? I don't think it's anti aliasing as straight 1 pixel 90 degree lines are blurred, too.

 

I wonder why the white zone of 3200x1800 image is more white than the 1600x900.
If you want more reports from owners I suggest to you to post in XPS15 thread.

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The white is different because of different settings on the camera.

 

OK, but you have to take the pictures in the same condition otherwise it's a unfair comparison.

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If I open the bottom panel to mount an mSATA solid state drive or another ssd 2.5 "sata, I lose the warranty?

 

Not at all. You can perform basically any service on your laptop without voiding your warranty; that's why Dell gives you manuals that show you how to do everything. Of course the new parts you install won't be covered by your warranty (unless you bought them through Dell and they're certified on that system) and if you break anything while working on your system, those repairs wouldn't be covered by your warranty, but otherwise you're completely covered. I've done this type of thing many times and have never had an issue with coverage.

I'm trying it right now scaling off (i.e. at 100%) and I can't see any blur. It obviously doesn't look nearly as sharp as running at 3200x1800 with scaling turned on in an app that supports it well, so by that standard it may be "blurry" (though I think "blocky" would be a better term), but that's to be expected because you're essentially rendering 75% of the panel's pixels useless for sharpening by dropping to 1600x900. It just looks like any other 1600x900 display now.

Just to make sure my expectations weren't too low, I cloned my desktop to an external panel I have that uses 1440x900 resolution. When I set that resolution on the internal panel, it just made the image less wide, so it's still a perfect pixel mapping scenario. Looking at the same text on the Windows desktop, in Firefox, and in Word output onto each display, I actually find the built-in panel BETTER, probably because of its higher pixel density even in this resolution compared to my larger external panel. When looking literally inches from each display, I did notice a TINY bit of blur on BOTH panels only in Firefox text (inside m's and p's, for example), but it was always WORSE on the external panel which used this resolution as its native (and was also present on my UltraSharp U2410 when I drove it at its native resolution later), suggesting that the blur in that case wasn't an issue with the built-in panel or drivers, but rather that Firefox's text engine simply may not be perfect and that, you know, that these panels aren't meant to be viewed from inches away.

So I think either something is up with your panel (unlikely if you don't see problems at 3200x1800) or you have unrealistic expectations of what 1600x900 should look like compared to 3200x1800 with properly applied scaling, or even a panel of the same size with a native 1080p/1200p resolution. If you'd like me to test in another specific app, I will if I have it, but I don't think the outcome will be any different.

 

Hello, I read the reviews of the model with panel 3200x1880, but I am more interested in the fullhd version, I think it's more redeable for a 15 inch laptop. Anyone know if the fullhd display cover 100% srgb?? Thank you.

 

I think both pictures should look the same. As you can see each rendered pixel consists of 4 'physical' Pixels when windows scales illustrator up. That's what it should look like when 1600x900 px are scaled up to 3200x1800. I can work with illustrator in 3200x1800 because its scaled up properly. Unfortunenately Photoshop is not scaling and i don't have an HiDPI external Monitor so i need to lower the resolution. And as you can see in the picures: One Pixel in Illustrator is not mapped to 4 pixels but something completely different.
Here is another picture with the same exposure settings. I could work with a normal pixel mapping. But this is blurry, there's no doubt about it.



There is a differene and i agree that it's not a hardware issue. Unfortunenatley i can only use the dell drivers and there's only one. What Version do you get with the xps?

 

Thinking about it more, I'm not sure they SHOULD look the same. It's entirely possible that Illustrator only scales the UI and intentionally DOESN'T scale the actual content area. Think about it: If even the content were simply blown up 200%, that would completely negate the benefit of all that extra resolution. I agree that doesn't quite explain why 1600x900 resolution isn't a perfect map onto the panel's 3200x1800 native resolution in Illustrator, and I neither have Illustrator nor am I familiar with the technical aspects of its rendering engine, so I can't speculate -- but I do know that drawing conclusions about the entire panel based on one test in one app is flawed. Has anybody repeated the same experiment in a similar application that definitely is NOT scaling aware and therefore wouldn't be doing anything special in the app like potentially only scaling certain parts of the app but not others?

What about for example drawing that line and saving it as a 1600x900 lossless PNG file that Windows could use as wallpaper? Set it as wallpaper on a panel with that resolution as native to confirm that it displays pixel-perfect without any sort of modification, and if it does, then try the image on the built-in panel when it's set to 1600x900. If it maps perfectly in both of those scenarios, then what you're seeing in the image you attached is Illustrator's fault, not the panel's or the drivers'.