Tech
Dell XPS 15 OLED: Review of a nearly perfect laptop with a 15-inch screen.
OLED is what makes Dell’s already impressive XPS 15 even better. This is all you need to know about. I’ve seen many OLED screens over the past decade, and they always fail to amaze me. Because of their nature, they have a bold appearance and capture deep blacks more effectively than LCD screens. With the most modern hardware from Intel and NVIDIA, you’ve got an ultraportable beast that will impress.
Following last year’s revamped XPS 15, you’ll probably have difficulty separating the new model from its predecessor. It’s still a solid and slim aluminum unibody and the highlight for the evening is its 15.6-inch display. It features some of the thinnest bezels available on the market, making the display appear suspended in the air. This year’s model is a 3.5K OLED touchscreen model. However, you can choose between two LCD panels which include a 4K+ touchscreen and a display with 1080p+. The benefit of these resolutions is that they have an extra few vertical pixels, which translates to the 16-x-10 aspect ratio.
While I’m certainly a fan of the advantages that OLED can bring to the user experience, all screens should look stunning. They all come with Dolby Vision HDR, and their LCD versions are quite bright, with 500 nits. The OLED model is rated at 400 nits. However, the much higher contrast will compensate for this. It’s also the sole screen that can support 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, which makes it ideal for those who require precision in color.
I’ll be honest: I’m mostly looking at my XPS 15 to gawk at its display. When I turned it on, I turned on the Matrix Resurrections trailer in 4K HDR to see if it appeared better than my OLED television. It was evident that the TV did look better, and I was amazed by my XPS 15. The images we see at night appear completely dark, while bright elements like light and explosions were amazing that they made me teary-eyed, and the TV was able to manage scenes with both dark and bright aspects. This is the benefit of OLED.
To take the XPS 15’s display up to the maximum, I decided to watch the film by Ang Lee called Gemini Man, one of the few films that are viewable in 4K and HDR with 60 frames per second. It’s up to you what you think about the film; however, the OLED screen makes that shootout with Will Smith and his younger replica feel like watching the movie in a theater. Indeed, it’s not an all-four-K resolution; however, this isn’t something you’ll feel while watching it. A bonus is that Dell’s upward-firing speaker did a good job during the majority all the motion.
In addition to the video, the XPS 15’s OLED screen makes watching everything enjoyable. I’ve never had such enjoyment scrolling through text-heavy websites, and even writing ideas down in Evernote was a little more enjoyable, thanks to the super-clear text. Images almost exploded out of the screen, as one would imagine. The color spectrum of DCI-P3 is about 25 percent larger than the more popular sRGB. This means that photos can showcase more depth.
The only way that the screen of the XPS 15 would look better was to take inspiration from gaming laptops and provide an increased refresh rate. The higher refresh rate allows scrolling images and text to appear smoother and more fluid. However, it’s likely to take a while before notebooks designed for work take advantage of this technology.
The XPS 15 review unit was equipped with 8 cores of Intel i7-11800H with 16GB of RAM and the 45-watt version of NVIDIA’s RTX 3050T GPU. This is at the bottom of the GPU’s energy consumption, and it could be up to 80 watts. This means that it’s inferior to the model used in gaming notebooks. However, it’s an enormous improvement over the last model, the GTX 1650 Ti. In the graphics-focused Geekbench 5 Compute benchmark, for instance, it was found that the XPS 15 notched around 6,000 more points than the previous model.
I don’t think many people will judge this XPS 15 on its gaming capabilities, particularly considering that you can find faster screens and possibly more powerful hardware at a lower cost from dedicated laptops. However, if you’re just looking to indulge in a little Overwatch action now and then, It’s powerful enough to achieve 70fps in Overwatch at 2,560 x 1,600 (1,440p+) with the highest settings for graphics. In reality, it has enough power to handle most modern games. But don’t play them at 3.5K.
Its XPS 15 also scored around 50% higher on PCMark 10, which is a PCMark 10 benchmark, something I’d say is due to both the Intel CPU and NVIDIA hardware. It is expected to handle the most demanding tasks effortlessly. It was able to transcode an entire 4K video clip into 1080p in just 35 seconds using a Handbrake and the NVIDIA encoder.
The trackpad and keyboard are the same as the previous year. I was impressed by the keyboard’s large layout and the responsive keys. However, I’m hoping Dell looks into ways to give additional depth. It would be great to see some of the CherryMX technology that Alienware has developed for its gaming laptops to be added to the XPS line. The trackpad, however, is extremely smooth. There are no complaints here.
I’d prefer to have at least three USB-C ports; however, at least two support Thunderbolt 4. Also, I’ll always give laptops a bonus for having an SD card slot that is large enough. This is something that photographers all over the world will be grateful for. I was also pleasantly surprised to see this OLED screen didn’t affect the battery life of the XPS as well as I thought it would. It ran over nine hours and 55 minutes in our battery test, compared to 10 hours and 10 minutes with the previous model that had the 4K+ LCD.
The only drawback of the XPS 15 is that Dell was slow adding OLED. It was reported that OLED would be available on the XPS 15 since CES 2019. I was a bit surprised that Dell did not include it in the redesign of the XPS 15 this year, and I’d wager that the pandemic slows things down. Other PC makers, such as ASUS, had a much shorter time to develop OLED laptops, and it’s difficult to find a reason not to blame Dell.’
The new XPS 15 starts at $1,300 with the Core i5 processor, integrated graphics, 8GB of RAM, and an SSD with 256GB. It will cost you $2000 to purchase our test unit with an SSD of 512GB. That’s a reasonable price for 15-inch laptops, even though they’re 16 inches. MacBook Pro is a rather costly $2,400 and still runs an old 9th-gen Intel chip.
In all honesty, I didn’t think Dell could offer much in its XPS 15 after last year. However, the inclusion of OLED can go a long way. It’s among the top screens that you can get on laptops nowadays. It’s so great it’s so good it renders the XPS 15 almost perfect.
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