Gaze in awe at this absolute unit of a monitor

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This 49-inch ultrawide has an absurd 5120x1440 resolution.

The monitor market isn't exactly flush with 49-inch models, though it did just grow by one today with the introduction of Dell's UltraSharp 49, an incredibly wide display that is essentially the equivalent of two 27-inch monitors.

This isn't a gaming monitor like Samsung's CHG90, which offers FreeSync 2 HDR support and has a fast 144Hz refresh rate. Dell's monitor lacks FreeSync or G-Sync technology, it doesn't serve up HDR visuals, and the refresh rate checks in at 60Hz.

The selling point from Dell's perspective is that the UltraSharp 49 is the "world's first 49-inch curved dual QHD monitor," which translates to a 5120x1440 resolution (32:9 aspect ratio). It's packing more pixels than the CHG90's 3840x1080 panel.

That claim will probably be true when the UltraSharp 49 arrives later this month, but it might not be the only one by the time 2019 rolls around. Philips announced this past March that it was giving its own 49-inch model (Brilliance 492P8) a resolution bump to 5120x1440, and that it would ship to the US market sometime in the fourth quarter.

Dell's monitor uses an IPS panel with a 350 nits brightness rating, same as Samsung's 49-inch model. That's above average, though below the 400 nits that VESA requires for this DisplayHDR certification, as a point of reference. It also has a 1,000:1 contrast ratio, 5ms response time (gray to gray) in fast mode (8ms in normal mode), and offers 99 percent coverage of the sRGB color space.

Connectivity options include two HDMI 2.0 ports, DisplayPort 1.4, and USB-C (power, data, and video), to go along with five USB 3.0 downstream ports. Dell says users can connect two PC sources using built-in picture-by-picture and KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) features.

The UltraSharp 49 will be available October 26 in the US starting at $1,699.99.

Paul Lilly
Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).