The Dell Pro 27 Plus is sharp, stylish, and oh-so-sensible – a nearly perfect business monitor

The Pro 27 Plus is Dell's idea of the perfect business productivity monitor. With a 27-inch 4K panel, ample connectivity, and a highly adjustable stand, Dell has taken the understated style of its recent UltraSharp designs and dressed it in a more office-suitable palette of greys and blacks.

Paring back the consumer-facing features to leave IT buyers with a simpler, more vanilla-flavoured package sounds like a recipe for success. The only disappointment? Dell hasn't trimmed the price to match.

Dell Pro 27 Plus P2725QE monitor: Design & Features

As business monitors go, the Dell Pro 27 Plus is a sharp looker. The slim bezels and subtle curves grow from the same genepool as the UltraSharp U2725QE, but here Dell has dropped the eye-catching expanses of off-white in favour of dark matte grey and silver. The result is a monitor that looks sharp and professional from any angle – exactly what you want in an office setting. The subtle, minimal branding is another boon too.

The good looks go hand in hand with a fully adjustable stand. You get 150 millimetres of height adjustment, and the monitor pivots easily into portrait mode in both clockwise and anti-clockwise directions. There's also more than enough front-to-back tilt and side-to-side swivel to make for quick and easy ergonomic adjustments. Naturally, if you prefer to use a monitor arm, there's a standard VESA 100x100mm mount at the rear.

The P2725QE is designed for the modern hotdesking office. Plug in the USB-C cable to your work laptop, and you get all the benefits of single-cable operation: the USB-C cable carries 90W of power delivery in addition to data and video.

There's a decent clutch of connectivity, too. The Gigabit Ethernet connectivity is a nice touch – although 2.5GbE would be even nicer – and you also get two 5Gbps USB-A ports at the rear. There is an HDMI and DisplayPort input, too, and only the lack of a daisy-chain port for the latter is a mild disappointment at the price. That would have made a nice, neat addition for rapid multi-monitor hotdesking.

It's nice to see that Dell has taken the little pop-out panel from the Dell UltraSharp U2725QE, though. Tap the little panel on the underside, and it drops down to reveal an extra front-facing USB-C and USB-A port.

You do also get a clutch of cables in the box. A 1.8m DisplayPort cable, a 1.8m USB-A to USB-C cable, and a short 1m USB-C to USB-C cable. And a power cable, naturally. These all slot neatly through the cable management slot on the bottom of the stand – and given the reduced number of ports on offer, this isn't as prone to getting jammed full of cables as the better-connected UltraSharp models we've tested.

One benefit of the Ethernet connectivity is that it opens the door to remote management. IT departments can lock down the control panel access to stop users mangling the image quality with manual adjustments and control a whole fleet of monitors using Dell's command line interface. Meanwhile, local users can take advantage of Dell's Display and Peripheral Manager software to adjust monitor settings from within Windows or access extra features such as tiling windows across the panel in non-standard arrangements.

In truth, though, the Dell's on-screen display and simple controls aren't hard to get to grips with. There's a power button and four-way joystick on the rear, and the joystick makes light work of navigating the various features. Tap the joystick once, and the quick menu gives rapid access to the main features – this quick menu is customisable, so you can ensure that only the most useful settings are exposed to the user. Tap upwards, and you can access the main menus to access the more advanced settings, or customise the quick menu options. It's all very sensibly put together.

Dell Pro Plus P2725QE monitor: Display quality

The Pro 27 Plus's specifications might not match the UltraSharp U2725QE, but they're a sensible compromise for most desks. The IPS panel offers a standard 4K resolution and provides a quoted 1,500:1 contrast ratio and peak brightness of 350cd/m2. There are no wide gamut modes on offer, but Dell claims that the P2725QE covers 99% of the sRGB colour space – exactly what you want for everyday use, in other words.

Subjectively, it's a joy. Images are bright and punchy, and colors and skintones appear natural. The matte anti-glare coating does a good job of battling bright direct lights, and the 4K resolution means that text is wonderfully crisp. If you're coming from a 27-inch WQHD panel, the increase in text sharpness may come as quite a surprise. For productivity work, it's a real boon.

In our more scientific testing, it certainly lived up to expectations. The panel covered 99.7% of the sRGB color space as promised, peak brightness slightly exceeded Dell's claims at 358cd/m2, and contrast was just marginally short of the promised 1,500:1 at 1,399:1.

The Pro 27 Plus also delivers for outright accuracy. At default settings, we tested it against an sRGB target and saw an average Delta E of 1.7 and a maximum of 3.9. The display white point measured at 6,265K, which isn't far off from the 6,500k ideal, too. All told, this is a monitor you can plonk on a desk, plug in, and expect pretty color-accurate performance with zero effort – exactly what you want from a business monitor.

Backlighting and panel uniformity has been disappointing in the recent Dell monitors we've tested, but the P2725QE bucks the trend. It's still not perfect by any means, but we measured brightness and contrast across 25 points on the display, and it was far more even than the UltraSharp U2725QE and its predecessors. Only two areas showed brightness variances of more than 10%, and even these received a passing grade for the ISO 14861:2015 standard. It's a good showing overall.

One nice bonus here is the presence of a 100Hz refresh rate. This isn't going to have a huge impact on the day-to-day, and there's no adaptive sync support for those sneaky lunchtime gaming sessions, but this creates a palpably slicker, smoother look to onscreen animations. Documents slide by that bit more smoothly, and while we can't speak to long-term eye comfort, it is more pleasant to work with than our standard 60Hz displays.

Motion clarity is very middle-of-the-road, however. Just like the UltraSharp U2725QE, Dell claims a standard response time of 8ms and 5ms with overdrive enabled. There's some obvious loss of detail on fast-moving objects in standard mode, although nothing egregious, but switch the Dell to its Fast overdrive setting, and the inverse ghosting is excessive. This results in ugly, bright fringing around moving objects. Our advice is to leave overdrive disabled.

Dell Pro Plus P2725QE monitor: Is it worth it?

The price is by far the pointiest thorn in the P2725QE's side. At the time of writing, it was retailing for £437 direct from Dell. If you're buying for a home office or a small business, you should consider whether you'd be better off with Dell's previous generation UltraSharp U2723QE. That's since been replaced by the ~£600 UltraSharp U2725QE, but you can still pick up the U2723QE for around £500, and it offers wide gamut support, improved colour accuracy, broader connectivity, and a KVM switch.

For IT buyers able to buy in bulk, however, the Pro 27 Plus's price may not be as off-putting. And moreover, the simpler, less fully-featured design brief may actually be a selling point. This is a very smartly attired monitor which offers a great balance of good-enough image quality, connectivity, and ergonomics. For businesses with a decent-sized IT budget, it ticks lots of boxes. Just be sure it ticks all of yours before buying.

Dell Pro Plus P2725QE specifications