 High Dynamic Range or HDR has been the next big thing in display technology for what seems like forever now. I mean, hell, our first video about it is from 2014 and it's hard to find a decent TV without that feature these days. And yet, HDR is still far from a mainstream feature on PC monitors. But, are we on the cusp of a revolution, sitting unknowingly at the bottom of a looming S-curve, about to be forcefully catapulted into a utopian future of super bright, hella vibrant displays? Well, if we were, then the Dell UP2718Q would be that future. It's a 4K monitor with full HDR10 support and 1000-nit peak brightness. Let's see if it's time to start giving a crap. Intro Music Browse privately and securely with TunnelBear, the simple VPN app. Start your 7-day free trial at the link in the video description. When it comes to looks, the UltraSharp 27 4K HDR from Dell lands in the Goldilocks zone of understated sophistication. Not too flashy for an office and not too dull for the $1500 price tag. It's got a space gray, are we allowed to say that? It's got a gray plastic finish, one of the easiest to use on-screen displays in recent memory, and a generous amount of mobility. The stand can tilt, swivel, pivot, and whatever that word for adjusting the height is. Let's go with elevate, but also the opposite of that. There are two HDMI 2.0 A ports on the back. The A is for A-H-D-R. Both regular and mini display port 1.4 ports, also HDR ready. An audio line out and a pretty sick integrated USB hub with six USB 3 ports, two with fast charging, and dual uplinks. That's so the UP2718Q can be used as a KVM switch to quickly move between tasks on two systems. Neat. And there's a bunch of impressive specs inside the display too. It's got a 4K 60Hz IPS panel with true 10-bit color and an incredible 384 local dimming zones. That is what allows it to produce super bright points with dark areas right next to them. And those bright points can be really bright, up to a thousand nits. Fun fact, nit is another word for the unit candela, which is equal to the light output of one candle. So this is basically like the output of a thousand candles in your face. Sort of. That's the peak brightness. Typical brightness sustained across the whole screen is 400 nits, which is still brighter than most displays. So all this culminates then in a truly professional grade monitor with high contrast ratios, accurate colors with delta E's under two, and excellent coverage of even the most demanding color gamuts. It even comes with a nifty color calibration report in the box. Neat. Okay then. So you're stoked as hell and you've got the Windows 10 creators update and you're ready to bask in the glory of HDR. You hit the toggle button and hey, why does it look so drab? Isn't HDR supposed to be, uh, what's the technical term again? The s***? Welcome to the HDR rabbit hole. HDR is an awesome technology, but Windows 10's implementation of HDR really demonstrates just how unsettled the dust is. So the colors went dull when HDR was turned on for two reasons. The first has to do with color space. Most of the content on your PC is likely to be in the sRGB color space, which has fewer colors than Rec. 2020, the color space used by the HDR 10 standard. So when HDR is on, colors need to be remapped to Rec. 2020. And since sRGB has fewer colors in the gamut, it's not always a good fit. The second reason it looks bunk has to do with brightness. With HDR on, Windows is imposing a ceiling of a hundred nits on the screen's brightness. The colors don't actually change. They still have the same hue. It's just that your eyes perceive them as less rich or saturated. Well, okay, but that's pretty crap, Linus. Why would Windows turn the brightness down? Because if it didn't, you would get blasted. When the non-HDR content is remapped, if the whitest whites were allowed to be represented by a thousand nits of brightness, a blank white page and say Microsoft Word would be blinding. Plus, all the other colors would look super saturated and wrong. So you might think then that it would be better if Windows could leave all the colors alone until it detects HDR content that's being viewed, and then it could just adjust them on the fly. But that's just not how it works right now. Okay, so then the solution is to just switch it on when you're watching HDR content, like stuff on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video or YouTube. Not so fast. Those guys offer HDR content, but due to browser limitations, it's actually only available through the apps on your HDR-ready Smart TV for now. Fine then, Linus. At least there's gaming, right? Okay, this one, yes. Mass Effect Andromeda looks sick in HDR. Unfortunately, if you also like to play other games right now, you're bound to end up disappointed. At the moment, HDR games are few and far between, and many of the titles you see advertised as HDR only do so on the Xbox One S or the PlayStation 4 or 4 Pro, where that TV HDR ecosystem is more mature. HDR games are coming though, so in due time, this monitor will be great for gaming. Kind of. And it's a beautiful monitor, but its 4K is capped at 60Hz, and its response times at about 6 milliseconds are not that competitive with the top gaming displays. So then, if you're a gamer who needs a monitor today, your money may be better spent elsewhere. And if it's HDR you're after, then hooking up your PC to a giant 4K HDR TV for the same price, that might make a fair bit of sense. So then, is the UP2718Q a solution looking for a problem? No, actually, not at all. Unlike Dell's own 8K monitor, this one has some very real applications today. If you're a content creator, you might want to consider the investment. Wide coverage of multiple gamuts gives you the flexibility to produce in whatever standard your project demands, the KVM switch is super elegant, not to mention very convenient, and compared to the pricing of professional grade calibrated displays, honestly, you're not really paying that more for HDR and Dell's solid reputation for monitor build quality and support. If you're a content consumer on the other hand, well it's back to the S-curve we go. Right now, I'd say we're about... yeah, and I'm gonna say maybe wait for about... yeah, okay? FreshBooks is built from the ground up for small businesses and freelancers. It's the simple way to be more productive, more organized, and get paid faster. 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So thanks for watching guys, if you disliked this video you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit the like button, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured, because it really is a great monitor, at the link in the video description. Also down there we've got our t-shirt store, which has cool shirts like this one, as well as our community forum, which you should totally join.