Review of Dell XPS 15 (2021): OLED screen, upgraded processors

Dell XPS Laptops are one of the most popular, thin and light Windows computers for money. The 13-inch model has long been a favorite of WIRED (8/10, WIRED Recommends), and the new 15-inch gets the same improvement that its younger brother received earlier this year: an OLED display.

This new 3.5K OLED touch screen helps the Dell XPS 15 become one of the best 15-inch laptops on the market. It also has a lot of power, thanks to Intel’s latest processors and a great trackpad and keyboard. The only drawback is the battery life.

XPS WITH OLED

2021 XPS 15 uses the same 11th generation Intel chips as the previous model. The big news here is the new OLED screen, which, we must note here, is optional. As with the XPS 13, you need to select the more powerful Intel i7 chips to get the OLED option. This means that the screen of the base model i5 remains unchanged. This is an FHD + screen with dimensions of 1920 x 1200 pixels.

If you choose iPS- or i9-based XPS 15, then you can choose between a 4K UHD screen and the new 3.5K OLED. If you want to know which is better … it depends. The resolution is better on a 4K screen. I also believe that the 4K model has a slight advantage in terms of battery life, although I compare last year’s 4K model with this year’s OLED here.

OLED is more expensive; the cheapest option is $ 2,100. The model I tested included OLED, 11th generation Intel Core i7, Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti laptop graphics processor, 16 gigabytes of RAM and 512 gigabytes of SSD. This configuration lists $ 2,200. From there, you can run it for up to $ 4,600 by choosing an i9 chip, up to 64 gigabytes of RAM and up to a huge 8 terabytes of SSD space, with some more reasonable configurations in between.

While the basic mode with the i5 chip is suitable for basic computer needs, I would suggest an OLED screen and a faster chip if you can afford it. It’s a wonderfully bright screen, and the razor-thin bezels give it immersive quality unmatched in the other 15-inch laptops I’ve tested. Editing photos and videos on this machine is a real pleasure, to the point that I ended up taking photos just to be able to process them in the XPS 15’s Darktable.

I also found that glossy OLED screens seem to do better in bright light than FHD screens. The 400-nit screen was good here, except in direct sunlight. The main problem with direct sunlight is that the high-gloss surface captures fingerprints like crazy. If you keep it nice and clean, sunlight and glare will not be a problem.