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

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.