Damn you, Apple! You’ve ruined me for life. In November of 2013, you re-calibrated by eyeballs. Now, I own a bunch of perfectly good hardware that I can hardly stand to look at.Well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but…
It was a faithful day in late 2013 when the UPS driver dropped off my 15” MacBook Pro with Retina display. Within an hour of unboxing the machine I knew I had just started down a path of no return. My epiphany came when I turned 90 degrees to my left, diverting my gaze from my new MacBook Pro to my 2009 27” iMac. What I once thought was the most beautiful computer display I’d ever seen, now looked shoddy by comparison with pixels the size of golf balls. It was almost as if someone had smeared Vaseline on my glasses.
My previous laptop was a 2009 17” MBP. Like always, I did the BTO (Build To Order) thing from Apple’s on-line store when I bought it and, like always, I got every hardware upgrade Apple offered at the time because my MBP is my main machine. I don’t need a “Starbucks Surfer”. As an IT consultant, I need a powerful, portable workstation with as many connections as possible to suit the myriad office setups I typically encounter over the lifetime of a machine (usually 3 or 4 years). I need as much RAM as I can get to accommodate a Windows VM because well, I’m in the IT business and some chores just require Windows. I also like a discrete graphics card to drive a large monitor when I’m “docked” at my home office. If you’ve used Mac portables as long as I have then you understand the word “docked” isn’t 100% accurate (or 75% or maybe even 60…). But I’m straying a bit. More on that in a minute.
For more screen real estate in my home office, I’ve been using a 27” monitor I bought from Monoprice.com that has the same resolution as my ’09, 27” iMac, 2560 X 1440. Obviously, I’m no super high-end graphics professional who worries about fractionally perfect color gamut, super-precise calibration and black hole equivalent contrast. In fact, I’m probably closer to the opposite. I certainly don’t want bargain-basement, no-name junk, but when looking for an LCD, I’m mainly concerned with screen size, resolution and input flexibility. With that in mind, this Monoprice-branded rig is pretty nice and after dealing with them for years, I’ve come to trust their hardware. It’s an IPS glass panel with every hookup you can imagine for under $400. It was a great companion for my 1920 X 1200 17” MBP, and I continued to use it after upgrading to my 15” Retina model even though the vastly different pixel density constantly reminded me how inferior non-retina displays are. I immediately began my quest for a replacement but quickly got my hopes dashed by the very limited, super expensive 4K offerings available at the time. Sure, I wanted a desktop monitor with a pixel density above the magical 175 PPI (pixels per inch) most people consider the threshold for a desktop “Retina” display, but I certainly wasn’t prepared to pay 2 to 4 grand for a 4K display with a 30 Hz refresh rate. Who do you think I am? Leo La Porte? I decided big(ger) pixels would just have to do ‘till the industry caught up with Apple.
So, a couple of months ago I got an email from Amazon.com telling me the Dell model I’d been watching crossed below the $400 threshold I had set a few weeks back. Even though I had never seen this monitor in person, I had done my due diligence in the form of researching both professional and customer reviews, so I decided to spring. For $375, Amazon.com 2-day shipped me the Dell P2415Q, 4K (3840 X 2160) monitor. Dell doesn’t call it a “Retina” display, but at 185 PPI it’s a huge visible difference from the 109 PPI of the Monoprice 27” panel it replaced. I think the whole “Retina” moniker is an Apple trademark anyway. The general definition has come to mean a display with resolution (more specifically, pixel density) so high that individual pixels are indistinguishable at normal viewing distance. Now, due to the wide variation in both the quality of human vision and viewing habits, there will probably never be a numeric metric for defining what a “Retina” display actually is. For my purposes, the Dell P2415Q is one. Dell does make the same resolution in a 27” format (the P2715Q) for a hundred bucks more, but I wanted the 24” model for two reasons: 1.) the price was under my $400 threshold, but mostly 2.) the 27” model’s pixel density of 163 PPI is getting dangerously close to crossing over into non-Retina territory…at least for my (corrected) eyesight.
Now, my “docked” setup has the Dell monitor on a short monitor stand centered just above my open MacBook Pro. This dual monitor setup gives me all the screen space I need and while not quite as crisp as my MacBook Pro’s display, the P2415Q acquits itself nicely. I’m not here to provide a “speeds & feeds” review of this monitor, rather a rundown of my experience with it, my overall impression and my value judgement. If you want a really thorough technical review for this unit, try PCMonitors.info. The folks writing for this site obviously take their reviews very seriously. I read their whole screed on the P2415Q and to be honest, I didn’t understand about a third of it. Your mileage may vary. Suffice to say, if there’s a way to measure a monitor’s performance to within a gnat’s ass, these guys do it.
So, to the fun stuff…
In short, WHAT A GREAT MONITOR! If you want a 4K companion to your Retina Mac you can’t do better than the P2415Q without spending quite a bit more. Yep, the MacTexan makes another successful blind purchase. Actually, it wasn’t totally blind and I’d like to speak to that point. As “big box” stores and many other brick & mortar retail outlets struggle to compete with on-line retailers, there’s a good chance they will fail altogether and we won’t be able to drive to our neighborhood Best Buy to check out prospective purchases. It would behoove us all to become well-versed in pre-purchase research. I’ve been asked to explain my method for making successful big-ticket purchases on-line, sight-unseen and I’ve already begun notating my process and will share it with all mactexans in the near future.
Ok. Nowwww to the fun stuff…really.
So, here’s the deal with my “docked” MacBook Pro in my home office. The closest thing to a proper docking station for a Mac laptop is one of the many Thunderbolt (and now USB3) expansion devices from Belkin, Elgato, OWC, and others. They vary slightly, but they all greatly expand a MacBook’s connectivity by expanding USB, video, audio and network ports from a single Thunderbolt connection. In the office, you keep your network and peripherals attached to the expansion device’s ports so when you want to use your MacBook, you simply plug in a single Thunderbolt cable and voila! All your peripherals are connected. My preference is the CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 2. I keep my Ethernet, external USB drive, speakers and of course my Dell P2415Q monitor plugged into it via DisplayPort. The monitor initially took some fiddling to get the display settings right. OS X didn’t recognize the monitor at first. When I unboxed the monitor, I connected it to the Thunderbolt Station and booted my MBP. For some reason my Mac decided it was a “Generic Display” so I couldn’t get the resolution set correctly. After a little on-line research, I discovered I needed to plug the monitor directly into one of my Mac’s Thunderbolt ports and set the display preferences first. I did so and everything worked. OS X correctly recognized the monitor as a second Retina display and allowed me to scale the text to my liking. I then shut down my Mac and re-plugged the monitor into the Thunderbolt Station’s DisplayPort. When I restarted, everything remained as I’d set it and it’s been working perfectly since. The only adjustment left was the calibration. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t demand super-precise adjustment. I spent some time calibrating my MacBook Pro’s screen when I first got the machine and haven’t messed with it since. I did notice the Dell’s color was quite a bit warmer out of the box with its default settings. I’m not a stickler for accuracy, but I don’t want my second monitor to look vastly different than my Mac. Making them match almost identically was no chore at all. I simply opened two Safari windows to the same web page and placed one on each display. With the Dell monitor situated just above my MBP it was a simple task to adjust the Dell’s RGB, brightness and contrast using the monitor’s built-in menu and my Mark I, optically-corrected eyeball. It turns out the Dell only needed a little tweaking to get the two displays to match very closely. The red and green needed to be turned down slightly and the blue needed upping just a tad. The Dell’s menu system is intuitive and easy to use with four adjustment buttons on the lower right-hand face of the monitor. This may not sound like a big deal, but believe me, it is. It never ceases to amaze me how convoluted some manufacturers make their monitors’ menus, both physically and logically. Case in point: The aforementioned 27” Monoprice rig has its buttons placed facing down on the bottom right of the monitor, completely out of sight with no labels. I call it “Brail placement”, because you literally have to feel your way around. Once you do activate the menu, things get worse. There’s no “up” or “down” buttons even though that’s the way the menu is structured so there’s no correlation between the menu on the screen and the button you need to push to make something happen. I swear, Hellen Keller could have designed it better.
I keep going down these rabbit holes…
The biggest visual difference between the Dell and the Mac’s Retina display is the ever-so-slight fuzziness of the Dell caused by its anti-glare matte finish. In fact, “fuzziness” is a bad adjective. Throwing out any economy of words, I’d say the Dell is only marginally less precise. Apple chooses the smooth glass of its retina displays for a reason. No display with a matte finish will ever look as sharp as one without the anti-glare matte. Like everything, there are tradeoffs. In this case, you’re trading image sharpness for glare resistance.
A really big stand-out feature of this Dell monitor is its stand (pardon the pun). It is a 100mm X 100mm snap-in VESA mount with over 6” of vertical adjustment. Now, one wouldn’t normally need all that travel except this stand makes the P2415Q capable of rotating 90° for portrait mode viewing. I’m considering buying a second one and putting one on each flank of my new 5K iMac, both in portrait mode…just because it looks so damn cool.
To sum up, I really like the Dell P2415Q (except for its stupid name, of course). Is it as nice as my Mac’s Retina display? Na, but I was never under the illusion it would be. Let’s face it, Apple Retina displays are second to none. One can’t expect to buy a 24” equivalent for under 400 bucks. What you do get is a solid 4K monitor that doesn’t reveal individual pixels. It’s a good companion for a Retina Mac (or any Mac for that matter). On top of all that, it’s a Dell. I’ve had a ton of business dealings with them over the years as an IT professional. I’ve owned their servers, Chromebooks and everything in between and I’ve come to trust their products and the way they stand behind them. I’ve probably purchased hundreds of their LCDs and can’t think of a single instance of dissatisfaction. Are they perfect? Of course not, but I will attest to their perfect record of making things right by me. In fact, I would rate them second only to Apple. Besides, they’re Texans.