Dell UltraSharp U5226KW review: The perfect ultrawide monitor for power users

When people say they prefer to work on a bigger monitor, very few will have anything as large as the UltraSharp U5226KW in mind. This is a monitor that takes the ultrawide designation as a challenge: its 52-inch IPS Black panel measures 120cm wide, and its 6,144 x 2,560 resolution packs in almost twice as many pixels as a standard 4K display.

Walk around the rear of the monitor, and its other asset – no pun intended – is connectivity. Thunderbolt 4 is centre stage, and this ferries 140W of power and 6K video and data via a single cable. This is allied with a further three upstream USB-C ports which allow you to take full advantage of the vast 52-inch canvas by using four systems on the same display – either one at a time, or simultaneously in the U5226KW's various picture-by-picture modes.

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Suffice to say, the U5226KW is a power user's dream come true. But whether you're just someone who wants an all-in-one alternative to a multi-monitor setup or a dedicated day trader, the question is whether the UltraSharp U5226KW is worth paying well over £2,000 for.

Dell UltraSharp U5226KW : Design and Features

Before you do start reaching for the company credit card, take a moment to ask whether your PC or laptop can actually handle the demands of the U5226KW. Achieving its maximum 6,144 x 2,560 resolution and 120Hz refresh rate requires a dauntingly large 47Gbit/s of data; an amount so high that not even the fastest current connections can supply it without using data compression. The result is that you'll require a DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.1, or Thunderbolt 4-equipped device and need Display Stream Compression to be enabled, too. Drop below those specs, and you may have to make do with 60Hz – or drop the resolution – so it's essential to check your PC, laptop or Mac's specifications before buying.

If you can vault those particular hurdles, then the next challenge is physical – actually getting the monitor onto your desk. To put it in perspective, if you've seen any of Dell's recent and more sensibly-sized 32in UltraSharp monitors, then just try to imagine what they look like to a 2-year-old child. This is the kind of scale which the U5226KW commands to an adult – just the panel itself is over 51cm tall and 120cm wide. That's around the width of two 27in monitors side by side, and one and half times as tall.

Despite the Alice in Wonderland proportions, the styling is classic UltraSharp. The wedge-shaped base is heavier and wider, as you'd expect to keep the monitor stable, and the panel itself is thicker, but the overall design and silver and dark grey palette are instantly familiar. It doesn't feel any more solid than its slightly plasticky stablemates, although this is probably just as well as it'd be unmanageably heavy. As it stands, it's just under 17kg with the stand – so you may want to phone a friend or colleague before attempting to haul it onto the desk.

The adjustable stand is fairly limited in its range of motion, but that's to be expected for such a large panel. There's 90mm of height adjustment and enough tilt, swivel and rotation to get the panel positioned comfortably on most desks.

Talking of getting it positioned: you'll want to take some time connecting all of the cables before you shuffle it into place. If, like me, your desk is hard up against the wall, it's essential to get everything connected first. Once it's in position, it's almost impossible to get around the back of the monitor as it's so tall and wide.

There's plenty of connectivity to choose from, too. The upstream Thunderbolt 4 port is accompanied by another three upstream USB-C ports, and these provide access to the monitor's various connections. In addition to 2.5GbE Ethernet and four USB-A ports at the rear, there are also a couple of front-facing ports which pop out from underneath the panel's front left edge. Press the panel inwards, and a little module drops down to reveal a single USB-A port and a pair of USB-C ports. The USB-C ports support up to 27 watts of power delivery, more than enough for charging mobile devices.

One thing to note: there's no downstream Thunderbolt 4 port for daisy-chaining extra devices – all of the allotted display bandwidth is tied up with refreshing the U5226KW's 15.73 million pixels 120 times per second.

And for some strange reason, Dell has omitted a 3.5mm audio output entirely. This would have potentially been a useful addition to the trio of front-facing ports, and it's a shame there isn't one – the integrated speakers are marginally better than the very poor ones integrated into most monitors, but they're not good. If you want audio that matches the visual spectacle, good headphones or dedicated speakers are a must.

As on most of Dell's pricier UltraSharp monitors, there's also an integrated KVM switch – and here it's essential for getting the most out of the U5226KW's multi-machine, multi-tasking abilities. It's possible to have four devices connected simultaneously, and in hardware KVM mode you can swap between each connected system with a keyboard shortcut (as long as your keyboard is connected directly to the monitor). You can't, however, cycle through the monitor's various picture-by-picture or picture-in-picture modes without reaching around the monitor's lower right corner – no mean feat given the size of the U5226KW – and adjusting the settings using the four-way joystick and on-screen display. That might be a workable scenario for some use cases, but universally convenient it most certainly is not.

This is where Dell's Network KVM feature becomes invaluable. Install Dell's Display and Peripheral Manager software (available for both Windows and MacOS) on every connected machine, and you can cycle through the fullscreen and picture-by-picture split the screen using keyboard shortcuts. What's more, it allows you to move your mouse seamlessly across the screen from one system to another, with the keyboard following suit. If you want to expand one system's view to fill the screen, you can just toggle the view mode with your preferred keyboard shortcut. It's incredibly neat.

There are limitations, of course. With the Network KVM mode enabled, both the Ethernet and USB ports are locked to the primary system. While this primary system can be designated as any one of the four upstream USB-C inputs, it does mean that you'll need to think about which devices you want to be connected to which machine. If you want those USB-connected devices to follow the currently active machine, then you'll need to decide whether you can live with hardware KVM mode – or use a separate USB hub.

One other useful feature is the integrated ambient light sensor. This can be tailored to your preferences and room lighting with the Auto Brightness Range Level, which lets you pick from Low, Med, or High settings. There's also an Auto Color Temp setting which attempts to match the display's white point to your lighting. While some of these modes can tend to create an overly warm, orangey tone to the image, the U5226KW's is far more subtle, just adding a hint of warmth or coolness where required.

Dell UltraSharp U5226KW: Display quality

It's fair to say that the U5226KW looks impressive from the off. The sheer size is one thing, but the clarity is impressive, too. The actual pixel density is a little lower than a 32in 4K monitor, but text remains nice and crisp. In fairness, you'll probably be sitting a little further away than a 32-inch 4K monitor, too, so the slightly larger pixels won't prove noticeable.

The matte anti-glare coating is quite light, and the result is that really bright light sources aren't quite as subdued as with more aggressive coatings. It does a pretty good job of suppressing glare from my office spotlights and skylight, although I noticed a little more glare than I'd like from the spotlights behind my seating position. It's a question of trade-offs – more glare suppression would add a more intrusive grain to the image. I think Dell's made a sensible compromise for a display of this size, but brighter offices hanker for a more aggressive anti-glare finish.

Color reproduction is very good indeed. It's immediately obvious that the panel reproduces an impressively wide palette – the default Standard mode renders colors with a decidedly over-the-top vibrancy. Strictly accurate for sRGB content, no. Pleasingly oversaturated, yes.

There are color-accurate modes if you want them, however. Dell claims that the panel reproduces 99% of the P3 color space, in addition to 100% of sRGB, and it promises an average Delta E of less than 1.5 in all of its factory-calibrated sRGB, Rec.709, DCI-P3 and Display P3 modes. The good news is that that is exactly what it delivers – I didn't see any average Delta E above that in any of the tested modes, and the color coverage was almost as promised, too, with 100% coverage of sRGB and DCI-P3 coverage falling just short of the claimed 99% at 96.5%. The only disappointment here is that there's no Adobe RGB mode.

All the usual plus points of an IPS Black panel are in evidence. Viewing angles are nice and wide, and the panel's subtle 4200R curve gives you a little more latitude to sit fairly close to the monitor. You don't want to get too close, though: both color shift and IPS glow become more noticeable in the panel's corners as you lean in.

The backlight and panel uniformity are more consistent than you might expect given the basic LED edge-lit design, too. You can see a little vignetting around the panel's edges where brightness isn't as consistent as it should be, but the U5226KW is actually more consistent than many smaller panels I've reviewed. On my review unit, brightness was about 10% lower on one section along the right-hand edge, 12% dimmer in the far top left corner, and only the very top right corner was a noticeable outlier – it was 16% dimmer than the centre of the screen. That's not going to trouble professional design displays, but it's respectable for such a large panel. Perfect it is not.

Similarly, the IPS Black panel produces much better contrast than standard IPS panels, but it's resolutely unimpressive when compared with TV-sized OLED panels. Blacks tend to look soft and greyish, and the result is that dark scenes lack the punch and perfect blacks of OLED. That said, it actually exceeded Dell's claimed 2000:1 contrast ratio, producing 2,234:1 in the Display P3 preset. That might not set any records, but it's more than good enough for the intended uses of the display.

One thing that's entirely absent is HDR, but given that brightness tops out at around 369cd/m2 and contrast is mediocre, that's a sensible decision by Dell.

Like all IPS Black panels, motion clarity is not a strong suit. Stand still in a game, and you'll wonder at the sheer size and clarity of the image. Start moving, however, and that clarity dissipates as the pixels struggle to keep up. While switching the response time mode from Normal to Fast helps to speed things up a tad, it's not enough to bring action into perfect crystal-clear focus – and at 60Hz it actually adds a really intrusive amount of inverse ghosting, which causes bright halos to float around the edges of moving objects. If gaming isn't a priority, then this probably won't bother you unduly – and it's more than good enough for movies – but if you're looking at the 120Hz refresh rate and hoping for crisp high framerate gaming, you'll come away disappointed.

Dell UltraSharp U5226KW: Is it worth it?

The UltraSharp U5226KW is not the right choice for every desk. Color-critical workers will benefit more from a display that supports hardware calibration – the stunning Dell UltraSharp U3226Q, for instance. Users who demand more impactful, blur-free gaming and a vivacious HDR movie experience should naturally consider an OLED monitor – or perhaps a TV – instead.

The U5226KW's talents lie in more productive enterprises. The sheer size of the panel fundamentally changes how you interact with the display: whether it's countless data dashboards, project management tools, vast spreadsheets, documents, or pixel-hungry applications, there's the scope for huge amounts of data to usefully coexist. Given the right desk – and the right use case – the U5226KW deserves to be a big hit in a very small niche.

Dell UltraSharp U5226KW specifications