Work from home means more hours spent in front of a monitor at home. Improving the quality of our work place at home will have positive impact to mental well-being during this challenging pandemic time. Dell S2721QS is a consumer product released in 2020 to support the new work-life balance during lockdowns across the globe.

Dell S2721QS is a 27″ monitor with impressive UHD (4K) resolution. There are two variants of this product. S2721Q is a similar product with identical display, but lack of the fancy stand features. S2721Q stand can only tilt. S2721QS stand can tilt, swivel, pivot and adjust height. I originally aimed for S2721Q, thinking that I will not need the fancy features of the stand. Ended up getting QS model because I saw good deal in Amazon. Seems that I made the right decision because the height adjustment actually help me to achieve much better desk set up.

The stand is will take 26cm x 17.5 cm space on a desk. The height adjustment will allow the overall monitor to stand between 40.5 cm tall (minimum height setting) to 51 cm tall (maximum height setting) when the monitor is on landscape orientation. Note that one could actually opt to use this monitor in portrait mode thanks to its pivot ability of the stand.

From technical perspective, Dell S2721QS has IPS display with anti-glare at 3H hardness, capable of 4K 3840 x 2160 resolution at 60 Hz. Brightness is 350 cd/m², contrast ratio is 1300:1 and response time is 4ms. It has 1x DisplayPort 1.2 and 2x HDMI 2.0 inputs. It has audio-out port and built-in 3W dual speakers, which is not much, but quite useful when I plug my Nintento Switch to this monitor.

As expected from modern monitor, there is no separate power brick. The power cable simply goes from the monitor to a power outlet.

Another cool feature of this monitor is its ability to display outputs of 2 machines at the same time. Picture-by-Picture (PBP) splits the screen into two sides. Picture-in-Picture (PIP) enables us to watch two images at once, by placing a small window inside the main window. Unfortunately, we can’t use it with 2 devices using HDMI. PBP and PIP are only usable with combination of 2 machines connected to the monitor through DisplayPort and HDMI cables.

Initial setup of this monitor is reasonably easy. The physical buttons at the bottom of the monitor can be used to adjust various settings. Default brightness of this monitor is way too bright for my liking. Fortunately, adjusting display and contrast is as straightforward as can be.

The on-screen menu is not perfect. I would even say it looks a bit clunky and such low resolution is rather disappointing when we think of a monitor with 4K resolution. At least it gets the job done. If we are using Windows, we can opt to download an app from Dell and do some settings from the app.

Two out of five physical buttons on the monitor are programmable. It means I can easily program them to display my Windows or Mac machine, allowing quick switching during normal everyday use.

Display looks vibrant and clear. Using this monitor with a Mac mini, Windows laptop and Nintendo Switch without any problem. Text are looking sharp, even though I had to adjust some scaling in both Windows and macOS so that the text won’t appear too small, which is quite common thing for UHD (Ultra High Definition) resolution display.

Overall, this is a good monitor and I am happy to recommend it to anyone in the market to upgrade their monitor.