Dell's 4K OLED UP3017Q was originally shown at CES 2016, but it's had a rough journey since then. According to reports from CES 2017, Dell was having trouble with manufacturing and chose to cancel the $4,999 display. So imagine my delight in learning today that Dell's finally ready to ship the dang thing — and at a significantly reduced $3,499 price tag.
Now, who is this 30-inch monitor for? I'm not sure, to be honest. Obviously, the OLED panel has absolutely wonderful colors and contrast, but while Dell says it has precise color and coverage for standards like AdobeRGB, most professionals working with color will probably gravitate toward high-end LCD displays to get the best idea of what their work will look like on the less-saturated screens people can actually afford. Of course, plenty of us have OLED screens in our pockets now, so maybe this is a great investment for a designer. I’m not the boss of you, designers!
The originally announced UP3017Q had an advertised 120Hz refresh rate. When combined with OLED's natural advantage on latency — the UP3017Q has a 0.1ms response time — this screen should be a wonderful premium buy for gamers. Unfortunately, this slightly revised release model only has 60Hz, which makes it a bit of a trade-off in the high end, where high frame rates are king. There’s also no G-Sync or FreeSync. Whatever, latency is probably more important than 1 billion frames per second.
Or you could just buy it and watch Netflix. That’s cool, too!
Basically, I want one of these screens on my desk really bad, and I don't need to justify myself to anybody. Dell is taking orders now for the monitor, and it claims to be shipping them in one to two weeks from now. I have a birthday coming up.