Love at First Sight—Dell’s Curved 40-Inch Monitor

A first look at the Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved WUHD monitor.

Made of multi-tasking. A 5K monitor allows for multiple windows to be visible at once.

A 5K monitor is an extravagance. So is a curved 40-inch screen. But to see the combination of the two, as we did recently with the Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved WUHD monitor, is to want one. A minute after being seated in front of one, the curved screen seems to disappear from sight—it being only a medium to other worlds, giving way to a bright, magnificent, undistorted view of your 3D model, your website, the document you are editing, your team chat … all at once. The resolution provided with a 5K screen lets you do that—multiple windows to be tiled, each as big as if they were on your old dimunitive screen.

The Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved WUHD monitor. (Image courtesy of Dell.)

The flat screens that have been pushed aside to make way for this behemoth of a monitor are going to seem very archaic, unnatural … and be hard to go back to.

Ostendo created the first curved desktop monitor in 2010. The curved screen made its debut as a television in 2013 with models from Samsung and LG at—where else—the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, drawing aisle-blocking crowds. Two years later, everybody seemed to have one. Curved screens have also appeared in a subtler form on smartphones (the curved edges of Samsung’s Galaxy Ultra, for example) but have not become mainstream—perhaps because the only problem they solve is the inability of flat phones to conform to your butt when you are wearing jeans.

The curved screen monitor, on the other hand, offers a degree of improvement over a flat screen’s view—especially in the periphery, toward the left and right edges, where the most distortion will occur.

Showing 3D objects on flat media has been a problem since time immemorial, à la cave paintings on cave walls, maps of Earth on paper, and so on. No doubt a hemispherical screen, its center midpoint between your eyeballs, would be ideal, but that is several CESs away. A curved screen can be considered a step in that direction. Curved screens are only curved along the vertical axes. There is just as much distortion of an image looking up and down as with a flat screen of the same height.

The best application for curved screens would be those few grown-up gamers with money. Kids running up their parents’ credit cards will have a hard time sneaking in a thousand dollar-plus purchase. Affluent gamers will benefit from a more immersive experience that lets them more quickly spot shooters or vehicles coming at them from the left or right. For engineering and design functions, the arguments for having a big curved screen will call for creative rationale. You can try “the glare from the flat screen will make me go blind.” “Productivity increases as a function of FoV (field of view)” was unsuccessful after such a study was not found.

If the Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved WUHD monitor’s price tag is too imposing at $1,600, you need to remind your boss that the first 55-inch curved screen TVs listed at $12,000.

A box the size of a baby mattress lands in the hallway with a thud. The pictures on the box give away its contents to a neighboring office mate, who insisted the delivery be diverted to their office. It was a 5-minute unpacking and assembly task—nothing more that attaching the stand to the back of the monitor. An HDMI cable is supplied and once it was attached and the unit was powered up, the monitor screen lit up in all its glory. I adjusted the screen resolution to get the maximum of 5120 x 2160, then adjusted the text so that it was small as possible while still readable. There is a small joystick in the back lower right-hand side that can adjust brightness, audio and other settings, but I found all the factory presets to be just right.

The monitor can be adjusted up and down 5 inches on the stand—not enough to accommodate shifting from a sitting to a standing position, but more than enough to adjust for the slouch I find myself adopting as the coffee wears off.

Dell claims to be first to introduce the 5K resolution, or UHWD format, to the 40-inch curved LED screen. A 5K display lights up an astonishing 5120 x 2160 resolution (21:9 aspect ratio) at 60 Hz. That’s 33 percent more pixels than the 4K monitor you might have just bought. Pixel density is 140 ppi with a pitch of 0.815 mm x 0.815 mm. Brightness is 300 nits (that’s typical).

Looks are everything to artists (most of them on MacBooks), so it is no wonder that Dell chose a silvery finish. On screen, all your models will be as realistic as modern display technology allows with 1.07 billion colors and 100 percent sRGB, 100 percent Rec 709 and 98 percent DCI-P3. (We can only assume those mean something to artists.)

The built-in KVM (keyboard, video and mouse) lets you keep your laptop plugged in and allows both your desktop computer and laptop to use the same screen while automatically detecting which is being used. You can also display the laptop in a split screen (picture by picture, or PBP) or picture-in-picture (PIP). (Image courtesy of Dell.)

If you want to share the monitor with another device, or multi-task using both your desktop and your laptop on the Dell UltraSharp 40, you can do so with the built-in automatic KVM (keyboard, video and mouse). The laptop display can take up half of the screen or be in a picture-in-picture mode. We honestly can’t think of a reason to do this, but perhaps that is because we are not creative or artistic.

An artist’s dream. Dell’s 40-inch curved monitor and “true-to-life” color will be great for digital artists—and impressive to their clients. (Image courtesy of Dell.)

The view from down under shows the stereo speakers, panel of ports, and AC input. (Image courtesy of Dell.)

Finding the monitor had stereo speakers was a pleasant surprise. However, they are small, and a specialized USB or Bluetooth speaker will likely do better for music. There is no microphone or camera, which would have been good to offer to help reduce desktop clutter, although we suspect most users will prefer their own aftermarket accessories. A certain amount of desktop clutter can be reduced by using the monitor’s many ports instead of a separate hub. The monitor puts out a total of 90W of power with its Thunderbolt 3 connector. There are a total of 7 USB ports—all facing downward—on the back of the monitor (see picture above). There is also an RJ45 (Ethernet) connection. Two HDMI ports are available as is one DisplayPort, but no older video connections are supplied, so computers and docking stations that are more than a few years old may need to resort to adapters.

A full list of connectors:

• 1 x DisplayPort 1.4 (HDCP 2.2) (10-bit color @ 60Hz)2 x HDMI 2.0 (HDCP 2.2) (10-bit color @ 30Hz)1 x Thunderbolt 3 (Alternate Mode with DisplayPort 1.4, SuperSpeed USB 10 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2) upstream, power delivery up to 90W)1 x USB Type B upstream port
• 1 x USB Type C downstream port (SuperSpeed USB 3.2 Gen2 with charging capability of 15W max)
• 4 x SuperSpeed USB Type A 10 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2) ports
• 1 x audio line out
• 1 x RJ45 port

Having exotic, expensive hardware sent to you is quite a thrill. For auto trade journalists, that could be a McLaren. In our world, it can be a $20,000 computer—or a sexy, big curved screen. Do pardon us for falling in love and gushing. However, engineers are nothing if not practical. We found ourselves wondering, “Can a monitor be too big?” and “How’s this curved screen really helping?” In the first few days, I had trouble finding my cursor. Moving the cursor from one side of the screen to the other took more room than my wrist and mouse were accustomed to. As I furtively looked up, down and sideways, I felt as if I were imitating a
Bobblehead. The webcam mounted to the top of the monitor was more like a skycam. Adjusting from a screen that is a mere 24 inches across to one that is 40 inches takes some time. But the time units are days. The Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved WUHD monitor is just so bright and beautiful—its curves so natural, its graceful, clean design so endearing—we never fell out of love. And as we (sadly) pack the monitor up and ship it back to Dell, we can only ask, “Why can’t every screen be so curved? So big. And so bright?”