It’s only been a few short years since the first 4K panels hit store shelves, and now we’ve got an 8K display you can purchase as well. This is a stunning panel for people who do a particular kind of work in photo or video editing. It boasts full coverage of the SRGB, Adobe RGB, and Rec. 709 gamuts, and 98% of the DCI-P3 professional gamut. 8K support is only driven via 2x DisplayPort 1.4 ports (making this explicitly an MST product) and its maximum brightness of 400 nits is fairly standard for the industry as well. But it’s not necessarily the kind of panel you should spring for just yet, for reasons we’ll discuss.
In many ways, the new UP3218K reminds us of the UP2414Q we reviewed nearly three years ago. The color reproduction and general feature set of that display wowed us, even back then, but the 24-inch screen was simply too small for realistic 4K use. The 31.5-inch Dell UP3218K might seem slightly more roomy. But remember — stepping from 4K to 8K quadruples pixel counts, it doesn’t double them. Icons and images designed for a 32-inch 1080p display will be 1/16th original size on an 8K panel. Even Microsoft’s font scaling options baked into Windows 10 won’t keep up with that issue.
The other downside is that displays this early in the production run often have issues that prevent them from functioning properly. For example, we still have that Dell UP2414Q, and to this day, it cannot switch from multi-stream transport mode to single-stream transport mode without rebooting the entire system. Simply turning this display off and on (or unplugging it and replugging it) doesn’t work.
Despite the impressiveness of the figure, we’re nowhere near 8K panels in widespread use, for a few simple reasons. One, we’ve just about gotten to the point where a single GPU can drive 4K, which only has 8 megapixels worth of image. Quadruple that again, to 32MP, and you’re not going to be pushing that image with any set of modern GPUs. Two, the power consumption, reliability, and price will all need to be improved to build a viable consumer product. Three, there’s no near-term rush to 8K because, again, 4K streaming and video content are only barely coming online in 2017. We’re years away from 8K content being widespread, regardless of what the videophiles would like to see.
Still, Dell does deserve credit for getting to this point in the first place. If you’re one of the handful of people that can actually use a display with this much resolution, you should be happy with the end result.
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