Forget about 4K, Dell has announced a new 5K monitor

4K is so last week. Most of us haven’t added one of those displays as part of our daily workflow yet, and Dell’s 5K option is on the way. The UltraSharp 27 Ultra HD 5K monitor claims a world’s first with said resolution. In terms of dimensions, that’s 5,120 x 2,880 which clocks in at four times the resolution of QHD and seven times that of full HD. The panel itself is 218 PPI, putting it just shy of the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and features the company’s PremierColor tech and anti-smudge/anti-reflection edge-to-edge glass across its 27-inch facade. There are built-in “immersive acoustics” thanks to a pair of Harmon Kardon 16W speakers with six USB ports, on-board card reader and adjustable base for sorting tasks.

What’s 27 inches across and has almost twice the pixel count of your puny 4K monitor? Dell’s new UltraSharp 5K monitor, that’s what. With a resolution of 5120×2880, the 27-inch monster has seven times as many pixels as your 1080p monitor, or four times as many as your 2560×1440 (1440p) monitor. It has a PPI of 218, which puts it on about par with the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (2880×1800). When it goes on sale around Christmas time — for $2500 — it will finally replace IBM’s mythical 13-year-old T220/T221 as the highest-res desktop monitor. The Dell UltraSharp 27 Ultra HD 5K monitor, to give its full name, is, unsurprisingly, a workstation-grade piece of hardware. It has all the usual trappings of a professional monitor, such as Dell PremierColor calibration, and an anti-smudge/anti-reflective coating. There’s six (!) USB ports and a media card reader, too. Curiously there’s also two integrated 16W Harmon Kardon speakers for some reason — presumably because Dell thought you should get a little extra if you spend $2500 on a monitor. At 5120×2880, Dell’s new monitor has a total pixel count of 14.7 million (14,745,600 to be exact). A 4K monitor or TV, by comparison, clocks in at just 3840×2160 – 8.3 million pixels. Your puny 1080p monitor or smartphone has just 2 million pixels. 5120×2890 at 27 inches works out at 218 PPI — comparable to high-res laptops such as the Asus Zenbook or Apple Retina MBP, but lower than the 300+ PPI of modern tablets and smartphones. Most importantly, though, 218 PPI is more than double your current 22- or 24-inch desktop monitor, which is probably sitting at around 100 PPI.