Dell 75 4K Interactive Touch Monitor (C7520QT) Review

I didn't know what to expect when Dell told me to visit its Manhattan office to review a $5,999 75-inch monitor. I had seen my fair share of oversize monitors but was still taken aback when I entered the room to find the Dell C7520QT covering half an office wall.

The 75 4K Interactive Touch Monitor C7520QT is a 75-inch monitor with 20-finger touch support. Unlike most monitors, the C7520QT doesn't go on your desk; instead, it's meant to be mounted on a wall or placed on a stand at the front of an office or a classroom.

After spending an afternoon with the C7520QT, I found that it served its purpose well, offering an extremely sharp picture, useful accessibility features and a fairly responsive touch experience, all at a competitive price. There were some things I wasn't too keen on, like the monitor's lackluster speakers and dim panel, but Dell's 75-inch 4K touch monitor is still a useful collaboration tool for businesses.

Design

At first glance, the C7520QT looks like a TV that you'd put in your living room and show off to friends. It has an expansive 75-inch screen and can be placed on a wall mount that looks a lot like those made for TVs.

But a closer inspection reveals features found only on monitors. Along with its wide selection of ports, Dell's 75-inch monitor has a slot in the back where you can slide in a Dell Optiplex Micro PC. There are touch-sensitive controls embedded into the monitor's bezels and the C7520QT can be placed on a floor stand and adjustable mobile cart.

Although not as attractive as Microsoft's Surface Hub 2S, the 75-inch monitor has an agreeable, if uninspired, design. Relatively thin bezels draw your eyes toward a large field of pixels, and the chunky monitor feels well-built, despite being mostly plastic.

At 40.1 x 68.3 x 3.1 inches and 141.1 pounds, the C7520QT is an absolute monster, and much bigger than the 29.2 x 43.2 x 3-inch, 61.6-pound Surface Hub 2S (50-inch display). It's also bigger and heavier than Sony's 75-inch X905G TV (65.0 x 37.8 x 2.9 inches, 77.6 pounds).

Ports and Interface

The Dell 75 4K Interactive Touch Monitor has a large and diverse assortment of ports on its back panel.

Inputs include a Display Port, a VGA input, three HDMI 2.0 ports, three USB 3.0 ports, three USB 3.0 Type-B downstream ports, a USB charging port, separate audio in/out jacks, an RJ-45 port and an RS232 Serial port.

Rear ports are typically difficult to reach, but side-facing ports, which are located behind the right edge of the monitor and face to the right side, are much easier to access on the C7520QT.

If you want the convenience of an all-in-one, the C7520QT has a slot for a Dell OptiPlex Micro PC. The OptiPlex Micro is a miniature desktop that is designed for businesses and runs Windows 10 Pro. By slotting the OptiPlex Micro into the side of the C7520QT, you're essentially turning the monitor into a giant touch-screen all-in-one. Best of all, the compartment is modular so an IT team can easily upgrade the PC with newer components. Of course, this is all optional -- you can plug in your Windows PC or Mac to use the 75-inch monitor as a second display.

You can adjust color, brightness and display mode by pressing on a touch-sensitive button embedded in the bottom panel. While the low-res menu icons look awful on this supersharp display, I had no problems turning on Comfort View and tinkering with white balance.

A similar touch-sensitive button on the right bezel enables Dell's "Screen Drop" accessibility feature, which lowers the image being displayed on the monitor to one of three positions, making the top portion of content reachable for shorter users and those with disabilities. The downsides of using Screen Drop are that the bottom of the image disappears off the monitor and the unused pixels above the image are left black.

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The only other input on the Dell 75 4K is a physical power button on the bottom edge.

Performance

The C7520QT's expansive canvas and responsive touch functionality make it great for the office, but a dim and somewhat dull display hamper the viewing experience.

Keep in mind that the 75 4K Interactive Touch Monitor was designed for viewing slideshows, charts and text in the office, not high-definition movies and TV shows at home.

Still, the 4K panel almost made me feel like I was sitting in a movie theater when I watched the trailer for Top Gun: Maverick. The monitor was so sharp that I could see individual strands of hair in Tom Cruise's hair and eyebrows. Colors were also decent; Cruise's fighter helmet was a bold red against the indigo blue of the expansive ocean below him. However, the monitor wasn't very bright and even cheap 4K TVs offer more saturated tones.

Fortunately, the C7520QT excels at what it was designed to be: a collaboration tool for the office or classroom. The monitor's massive size uniquely allows multiple users to work on a project at once, and with 20-point touch, they can all use their fingers or a stylus.

The multi-touch feature worked like a charm when I scribble notes in FlatFrog -- the only software Dell includes with the 75 4K monitor -- while a Dell rep drew lines down the screen with all 10 fingers. I had no problems using the included passive stylus in Microsoft's Sketchpad drawing software, either.

Text looked sharp on the 75 4K Interactive Touch Monitor as I swiped through websites and the monitor's anti-glare and anti-smudge coatings won the battle against harsh office lighting and my oily summer skin.

Working with multiple apps and programs at once is made easy by Dell's Display Manager software, which lets you choose from more than a dozen different window layouts. I quickly snapped a Google web page in the top-left corner, another browser window in the bottom-left corner and a drawing app on the right half of the monitor. Despite taking up a fraction of the 75 4K's real estate, these discrete windows were much larger than my own Dell work monitor.

All of these features make the 75 4K a worthy replacement for an office or classroom's Smartboard or whiteboard. However, there were some things this $5,999 monitor really struggles with.

While my experience using the touch screen was mostly positive, there was noticeable input lag when I scrolled down web pages or quickly swiped across the monitor with the stylus while my fingers were touching the glass.

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The speakers are also lackluster. It's great that the monitor comes with speakers, but From Indian Lakes' song "No One Else," sounded hollow and distant coming out of the monitor's dual 20-watt rear-facing drivers. But the biggest problem is the monitor's insufficient display brightness.

Lab Testing

Dell's 75-inch 4K Interactive Touch Monitor has decent screen quality based on our lab results, but the display doesn't get very bright.

The monitor averaged a peak luminance of 218 nits, making it dimmer than most traditional monitors we test, including the $199 Asus VG245H (252.6 nits) and the Samsung CHG70 (364.8 nits). The Dell 75 4K's anti-glare coating does a decent job compensating for that low brightness, but we really wish the monitor hit at least 300 nits.

The 75 4K Interactive Touch Monitor covers 113% of the sRGB color gamut, which is a decent result. A quality monitor, like the CHG70 (154.1%), typically lands around the 150% range for color, but the C7520QT is plenty vivid for business use. We test monitors and TVs a bit differently, but the Sony X950 75-inch TV reproduced 99.8% of the Rec. 709 color space.

Colors are quite accurate on the 75 4K monitor, which scored a Delta-E rating of 0.3 (closer to 0 is better) when we tested it using a Klein K-10A colorimeter. The CHG70 (0.1), among the most color-accurate monitors we've tested, topped the C7520QT, as did the X950 TV (2.5), but most other panels, like the VG245H (3.3), trail behind.

Bottom Line

With a massive yet sharp 75-inch, 4K screen, 20-point touch screen support and some genuinely useful software tools, the Dell 75 4K Interactive Touch Monitor is a compelling upgrade to an office's whiteboard or a classroom's Smartboard.

However, there is room for improvement. The large panel is fairly dim and the built-in speakers sound hollow. I also noticed some input lag when navigating the web via touch gestures. And at $5,999, the 75 4K monitor isn't exactly an impulse buy. That said, few alternatives give you this much screen real estate with touch functionality. The Surface Hub 2S is the first that comes to mind, but the 50-inch version costs $8,999 and the larger 85-inch model won't arrive until 2020.

Overall, the Dell 75 4K Interactive Touch Monitor is a huge touch-enabled monitor that's excellent for collaboration, even if its screen and speaker quality aren't the best.

Credit: Laptop Mag

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