Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

The QHD+ screen is not an IPS, but a PPS IGZO, so the viewing angles are slightly lower than an IPS, 160° vs 180°.

 

The QHD is gorgeous and clearly the way of the future. Working in Office with it makes my other displays look plainly inferior - and everyone I know that has seen it loves it.

Out with the old, in with the new.

 

Oh absolutely, I agree: At some point in the future we may have a version of Windows, as well as applications, that will work with such screens. Unfortunately for me, I will have to work with this machine today, and not at some unspecified time in the future. Be sure to let me know when that future arrives, and I will get a high-resolution screen then. Today, I need a screen that I can actually use.

 

If you need something today, why not the 1080p TN panel? (assuming all the other specs are in line with what you need). TN doesn't automatically mean garbage, we have some Thinkpads at work that have very nice TN displays.

If you ask me, 1080p on the QHD looks fine. Then again if your work requires the accuracy of an IPS panel then disregard.

 

I got an M3800 with the QHD screen precisely because I knew it was "the future", but what you say about it being a massive pain in the today is completely correct. The scaling in Windows is so bad some applications are unusable as text and UI elements are so mangled up.

 

I wish there was an in-depth side-by-side comparison of the two screens, both at native resolutions and at half-resolution for the QHD+. If anyone has seen something along those lines, that would be tremendously helpful. I have seen an early report of fonts looking blurry on the QHD+ at half-resolution, but it wasn't clear whether that was a typical problem of this configuration, or an issue with the specific machine (or drivers) in question.

 

One person quite a while back mentioned that he thought text on QHD+ at 1600x900 was blurry. Having tested this myself by setting my QHD+ panel to 1600x900 and mirroring to my external display whose native resolution is 1600x900, looking at text in both the Windows UI and various applications, I couldn't see what he was talking about, and I have outstanding vision. Someone later suggested that the issue could be caused by the fact that ClearType's font smoothing algorithms assume a certain sub-pixel element order that the QHD+ panel does not use. That's plausible, and when I placed my face literally inches from the panel, I could see a tiny -- TINY!! -- amount of blurriness, but that was at a ludicrous viewing distance and was completely absent from my experience viewing it normally.

I doubt you'll find a side-by-side comparison of the two simply because I doubt any single owner has one of each.

 

Which applications have that level of usability problem and can you notify the developer? I know that some graphics apps have issues (ie, Photoshop) that are actively being worked on. Illustrator has been fixed. I've notified Phase One of problems with Capture One.

I half res it for C1. It's a minor annoyance, but it works in the meantime. Fonts look fine as far as I can tell, but I haven't tried putting my nose 5 inches in front of the display...

I'm most surprised by how well older apps work. I use an ancient version of quickbooks and it scales beautifully.

 

I used the m3800 with Photoshop for 8 hours. Actually the Photoshop window was on an external 24 inch monitor and Thunderbird on the qhd screen at 1600x900 PX. At that resolution clear type calculates 1600x900 antialiasing. The upscaling adds another aliasing layer which makes text blurry. The retina macbooks had the same issue. Its fixed on macs. Maybe some have an even more outstanding vision.

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/75882/turn-off-blurring-on-mac-book-pro-with-retina-display

 

Well.. Getting an base M3800 as an exchange for my Latitude. May or may not be keeping it, so I may or may not be joining you guys after it arrives in 2-3 weeks. I guess I'll be able to decide for myself if the 1080p screen is really that bad or not!