Initially teased at CES earlier this year, Dell’s UP3017Q is an amazing 30-inch 4K monitor with an OLED panel capable of running at 120Hz. The thin bezeled UltraSharp is also extremely thin at less than 0.5” at the edges. Running a resolution of 3840 x 2160, the 30” monitor comes in at 146 PPI (pixels per inch). The UP3017Q was originally slated for a March release, but it ended up not being available. Reportedly, Dell is still fine tuning the monitor and it will be available soon though the company has not given a new specific launch date when you will actually be able to buy it.

It has some rather impressive specifications, and I am really interested in seeing it in person! The panel manufacturer is still unknown (though many have guessed it is one from LG), but it offers up a resolution of 3840 x 2160, refresh rate of up to 120Hz, 0.1ms response time, and 400,000:1 contrast ratio. Being OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode), the monitor will be able to deliver true blacks and excellent colors in a very thin profile thanks to not needing a separate backlight (the pixels themselves emit light). Dell claims that the UP3017Q 4K monitor fully supports 100% of the Adobe RGB and 97.8% DCI-P3 color spaces. At a claimed 1.07 billion colors this is a 10-bit color monitor which will be useful in professional applications where color accuracy is paramount.

Dell has further claimed that it has mitigated burn in on this monitor by implementing a “pixel shifting algorithm” as well as placing a sensor on the monitor that can detect when you are looking at it and turn off when no one is watching anything on it (which some might find a bit creepy but it can likely be turned off heh). There are five buttons on this monitor, four on the bottom edge for OSD controls and one on the back to release the monitor from its stand.

One interesting hang up lies in the video inputs on this monitor. It only has HDMI 2.0, Mini DisplayPort 1.2, and USB Type-C. As posters over at [H] pointed out, the HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.2 connections do not have enough bandwidth to support the panels 3840 x 2160 resolution at 120Hz. Fortunately the refresh rate is not a lie. There is a a way to do it, but users will need to use the USB Type-C connector and it’s DisplayPort Alternate Mode feature to do it. At DisplayPort 1.2, the DisplayPort Alt Mode can give you 5.4 Gbps per lanes and using all four available lanes can hit a total of 21.6 Gbps which would be enough to support 4096×2160@60Hz. However, the DisplayPort 1.3 standard (which this monitor and it’s USB Type-C port seems to support) can give up to 8.1 Gbps for up to 32.4 Gbps of bandwidth (25.92 Gbps after 8b/10b encoding overhead) which should allow the full 3840×2160@120Hz to be used. It is unfortunate that Dell opted to go with this odd port arrangement and not include a direct DP 1.3+ port though!

This monitor has a lot of potential, but this massive OLED comes at a price: when it comes to market it will have a MSRP of $4,999! As much as many would want this to be their new gaming PC monitor, I think it will be mainly for commercial and design applications especially with the input lag being unknown and no support for the various variable refresh rate technologies (AMD FreeSync and NVIDIA G-Sync) If that is what you are looking for there are much cheaper options, but if you want an all out OLED monitor for work and media and price is no object I would be very eagerly waiting for reviews on this!

What are your thoughts on this monitor and OLED?