Dell XPS 15 Review

New Dell XPS 15. Billed as the premium top of the Dell line, it's a beautifully designed lemon. It's absolutely shithouse.

Annoyingly, the keyboard layout is set by default to "US International" which introduces numerous strange quirks while typing. The trackpad is large and pleasant, but it has a silicon finish which makes it a little sticky, and it has a cheap clicky sound when you press (even lightly) the buttons down the bottom.

The Dell TN panels are complete crap.
The screen is the absolute shitter, though. It's an incredibly crappy panel which exhibits the following:
  1. Ghosting around text, icons, and lines.
  2. Terrible colour reproduction, resulting in strange banding and weird globs of solid colours in photos and videos.
  3. A nasty mesh effect throughout the display. This gives flat colours a nasty fabric texture, and is infuriatingly obvious on whites.
  4. The screen tears every few pixels when you move stuff vertically. The edges of things sort of tear horizontally when it moves vertically, leaving a flickery breakage which is very visibly wrong. This is something I've only ever noticed on the cheapest of cheap displays, and it's really annoying because your windows get jagged zipper edges whenever you move them across the screen.
I've noticed the display is really bad at video. People's faces get flattened by the colour issues, and hair turns psychedelic with the ghosting. There's no nuances, this screen is grotesquely blunt and has a tendency to make everything gaudy and blown out. It is completely inappropriate for anything graphics related, and I'm going to be returning it tomorrow. I'm just blown away by how god-awful the thing is, nobody mentioned any of this in the reviews!