As an owner of an Apple MacBook Pro, I’ve been on the lookout for an external display. Sadly, the only monitor that Apple itself makes is the extremely expensive Pro Display XDR, infamous for a starting price of $4,999 dollars for just the display. A bit too rich for my blood, though I can understand the high cost. Competitive 32-inch HDR 10-bit displays with hundreds (and thousands) of LED dimming zones are all above $4,000 dollars. Unlike Apple though, other manufactures throw in a display stand for free, rather than make you pay extra.
On a chance scroll through the Amazon app one morning, I found a refurbished Dell UP3221Q 32-inch 4K HDR monitor on sale for about half its then $3,999 street price. There was only one available, so I acted super quickly with the buy now button. A week later, the 50 pound behemoth of a package arrived at my door. After nearly two years of only using a laptop display (I previously had a 27-inch iMac), it was strange to suddenly have four times as much screen real-estate again.
A month after purchase, I returned the Dell monitor. The quirks of the UP3221Q vis a vis using it with my MacBook Pro can’t overcome the admittedly spectacular images when viewing video. And buying it for half off MSRP.
The first problem is the 4K resolution. Due to how macOS handles high DPI with essentially a doubling of pixel density, the ideal pixels-per-inch is around 220. This is why the similarly sized Pro Display XDR is 6K in resolution, instead of 4: to achieve that all important retina pixel density. The UP3221Q has a PPI of only 140, and text looks relatively horrible compared to the MacBook Pro’s internal retina display. The sharpest possible would be to run the Dell at native resolution, but the UI is unusually tiny at that scale.
The second problem is the display has trouble with waking from sleep after a prolonged off period, such as overnight. Nearly every morning I had to unplug and reinsert the thunderbolt cable from the MacBook Pro to get the UP3221Q to show the login screen. A real pain in the neck when all I want to do is start my day with a scroll of twitter. This isn’t really Dell’s fault: from what I’ve gathered on the issue, modern Apple laptops simply don’t play as nicely with third-party displays as one would expect.
The third problem is something I didn’t realize until I got to handle a Pro Display XDR for work. With the Apple monitor, you’re able to show both HDR and SDR content at the same time. Meaning, you can have a windowed video running in HDR whilst the rest of the UI is still in SDR. This is not possible with the Dell: it’s either or. I have to switch to the HDR color space every time I want to watch a Youtube HDR video. Because the macOS UI isn’t HDR, it looks like crap in that mode. I have to switch the UP3221Q back to SDR during normal use.
Which presents a fourth problem: the Dell monitor doesn’t do local dimming in SDR mode - only in HDR! Those sweet 2,000 dimming zones isn’t worth anything unless I am watching HDR content, which as of right now is very seldom. No such issue with the Pro Display XDR: it performs local dimming no matter what content is being shown on screen. It just works.
These compromises combined is far too jarring for a monitor that, even at half off, represents a hefty investment. I hope to get at least 10 years out of the monitor, and I don’t want to be constantly reminded of the tradeoffs with the UP3221Q. The choice is simple: save up some more and buy the Pro Display XDR (I’ll skip the $1,000 dollar stand).
Good thing Amazon’s refurb program - called Amazon Renewed - has a generous 90-day satisfaction return policy. The seller even paid shipping back, which is lovely.
I hardly knew ye.