Dell XPS 15 OLED Review _ Best Video Editing Laptop

# The New Dell XPS 15: A Comprehensive Review for Content Creators

## Introduction: The Growing Need for Powerful Laptops in Content Creation

In today's digital age, the demand for powerful laptops has never been higher, especially among content creators. Whether you're editing videos, rendering 3D models, programming, or photography, having a laptop that can handle these tasks efficiently is essential. Enter the new Dell XPS 15—this review delves into its features, performance, and whether it stands out as a top choice for your creative needs.

## Design: A Timeless yet Modern Approach

The Dell XPS 15 continues its legacy of sleek design with a combination of aluminum on the lid and bottom, providing rigidity, and black carbon fiber on the keyboard deck. This design not only looks elegant but also stays cleaner compared to glossy plastics or matte finishes that easily collect fingerprints. The thin bezels around the display remain a standout feature, with Dell leading the industry in this aspect. A notable improvement is the webcam positioned above the screen, addressing past criticisms of the "nose cam" below the display.

However, two minor drawbacks are worth mentioning: the absence of the new frost white color option available on the XPS 13 and a hinge that still requires two hands to open, despite being sturdier.

## Screen Quality: A Showstopper with OLED Technology

The star of the show is the brand-new OLED 4K screen from Samsung's AMOLED panels. While many laptops this year use similar screens, the XPS 15 distinguishes itself through superior calibration and implementation. The display offers impressive color accuracy, supporting 100% sRGB and Adobe RGB, making it ideal for photographers and video editors. The contrast is exceptional, with deep blacks that enhance visual appeal.

Despite being glossy, the screen reflects less light compared to competitors, reducing glare during use. This makes the XPS 15's display not only visually stunning but also reliable for professional edits.

## Ports and Connectivity: Essential Features for Content Creators

The XPS 15 excels in providing a variety of ports crucial for content creation:

- **Two USB-A ports** for versatility.

- **One HDMI port** for external displays.

- **A USB-C Thunderbolt 3 port** for high-speed data transfer and external device connectivity.

- **Full-size SD card slot**, invaluable for quick transfers from cameras or drones.

These features make the XPS 15 a practical choice for professionals needing multiple connections without relying on adapters.

## Performance: Tailored for Content Creation

The XPS 15 is equipped with a ninth-generation Intel Core i9 processor and 32GB of RAM, making it a powerhouse for demanding tasks. Tested rendering times in Adobe Premiere Pro showed the XPS 15 outperforming competitors, completing a two-minute clip in under five minutes—a significant improvement over previous models.

Video encoding tests also highlighted its efficiency, with the XPS 15 being 15% faster than the MacBook Pro in HandBrake. This makes it an excellent choice for those needing quick processing times.

## Gaming Capabilities: Not a Primary Focus

While the XPS 15 includes a GTX 1650 discrete graphics card, its design and power management make it unsuitable for gaming. Users should expect reduced settings at 1080p for decent frame rates. It’s clear that Dell prioritized content creation over gaming in this model.

## Battery Life: Moderate but Practical

With a 4K screen, battery life is limited to around six or seven hours under moderate use. However, the 1080p LED version offers better endurance, making it a practical choice for those prioritizing portability.

## Pricing & Configurations: Balancing Budget and Power

Priced at $2,500, the top-of-the-line XPS 15 offers significant power but comes with options to adjust costs. Downgrading to an 8-core processor or choosing a lower-resolution screen can bring the price down to around $2,200. Even the base model at $1,100 provides decent performance, though it lacks the necessary features for serious content creation.

## Conclusion: A Top Choice for Content Creation

While future updates may bring new designs, the XPS 15 currently stands as a top contender for those needing a powerful laptop for content creation. Its combination of high-performance hardware, excellent screen quality, and comprehensive port options makes it a standout choice in its category.

For more insights, feel free to leave comments below or explore our video review comparing the XPS 15 with the MacBook Pro.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe all have different needs from our laptops but one that's increasing a lot these days is content creation whether that's video editing 3d rendering programming or photography if you're doing any of this stuff professionally or even just as a serious hobby you're gonna need a powerful laptop that can actually do that work and that means a high core count processor a discrete graphics card and maybe even a really color accurate display all that stuff is hard to find in one place but my friends this is the new XPS 15 that we're reviewing today and I think it just might have all of that in one package if you're familiar with the XPS 15 the 2019 model doesn't really have any surprises in terms of the look this is actually the fourth iteration of this same design they've been using since 2015 so these is the combination of aluminum on the lid and the bottom for that strong sense of rigidity and then the black carbon fiber on the keyboard deck not only does the carbon fiber look great it also keeps things really clean at least compared to like a glossy plastic or even like the soft touch matte black of the razor blade which honestly you get fingerprints on it within minutes of taking it out of the box so even though it's getting a little familiar at this point I still like this design a lot I mean those thin bezels around the display still look great you know Dells always been an industry leader in terms of that and this time around they've even gone through the effort of shrinking down the webcam to fit it above the screen that was you know the biggest complaint about this laptop and the XPS the routine over the years is that you had the nose cam underneath and display that's all taken care of this time without growing the bezel much at all on the top and that's really cool a couple small things to mention about the design of the XPS 15 versus the new XPS 13 is that you don't get the new color options so you don't get that frost white that they use on the XPS 13 that I actually really like I wish they had brought that over to the 15 inch model and then also the hinge it's still really difficult to open that was something they fixed on the XPS 13 but this is something that requires two hands unfortunately so while that keeps the screen from wobbling it does make it kind of in convenient but in 2019 it's really all about the screen on the XPS 15 of course you can still get the standard 1080p led model but what we've got here is the brand-new OLED 4k screen courtesy of Samsung's AMOLED panels and not only is this the best of these new OLED laptops that have this exact same panel it's also the straight-up best laptop screen we've ever tested now you might be wondering what I mean by that since all these laptops that use OLED panels this year come from the exact same manufacturer Samsung and it's the exact same panel actually so shouldn't they be the same well yes but the implementation and the calibration of these pales varies wildly from system to system so so far I've tested the razor blade to OLED as well as the Alienware m15 Zola and the XPS 15 is by far the best of the three it's less saturated and bold and it's a whole lot less reflective even though it's still a glossy panel the other ones are actually crazy reflective and I found myself staring back on myself a lot less on the XPS 15 and I like those screens the XPS 15 is really really color accurate because they tone down some of that boldness and saturation it supports the widest color game impossible with a laptop screen with a hundred percent on srgb and Adobe RGB and obviously the contrast is just wild because of how deep those blacks are with OLED it is definitely a little bit warmer than a macbook pro screen but in the end it's a screen that you can trust with your edits so whether you're a photographer or a video editor that's a really important consideration to make when you're going out and buying a laptop another really important consideration for people in those fields are ports and fortunately the XPS 15 still has a lot of them so you have the option of two USB a ports an HDMI port a USB C Thunderbolt 3 port and most importantly a full size SD card slot which is going to be really helpful again if you're in that field and you need to throw some video or images onto a laptop quickly now let's talk about performance because there's been some confusion out there about what exactly the XPS 15 is trying to be and what it is not and let me just say this very clearly this is not a gaming laptop and you should not go into the purchase of the XPS 15 thinking that it is I mean the 4k screen locked at 60 Hertz should tell you that alone it does have a decent discrete graphics card option the GTX 1650 which is better than the previous generations but honestly in games you're still gonna be needing to reduce settings down to medium and that's at 1080p of course just to get some decent frame rates and that's because of how this laptop was built the size of it and because of how the system throttles performance so sure do some gaming on the side with this that'll totally work for this laptop but if you go into buying this thing as a dedicated gaming machine you're gonna be pretty disappointed what it is good at in fact what it's really really good at is video editing our unit comes with the ninth gen 8 core core and n processor and 32 gigabytes of RAM and seriously this thing can blow through premiere renders so fast way faster than you ever thought a laptop probably could so I did my typical test a two-minute clip rendered at 4k in pro res 42 in Premiere and just listened to the results that you get across these different machines so on the 2019 MacBook Pro that came with that same core iname processor it took this render ten and a half minutes on a 20-19 razor blade which comes with a six core processor but a better graphics card down to nine and a half minutes but check this out with the XPS 15 and whatever they're doing with the cooling here and the entire system working down to just under five minutes now if you were running that MacBook Pro with Final Cut you might see some different results there but in this particular scenario I was super impressed and it totally blew away my expectations about what this laptop failed to do we also tried some video encoding and handbrake and the XPS 15 was 15% faster than the MacBook Pro again same processors there in fact this was the fastest score we've ever seen on a laptop outside of the Alienware air hit 51m which is a huge gaming laptop that has a desktop processor in weighs eight nine pounds so still really impressive now battery life isn't this laptops greatest strength obviously it's got a 4k screen so you know that's gonna limit what it can do but honestly it's got six or seven hours in moderate to light usage and that's pretty good and you can still get the LED 1080p version which historically has been one of the best performers in terms of battery life so if you're specifically a video editor I can highly recommend the XPS 15 in this particular configuration with the OLED screen and the core I nine process it now you don't want spend $2,500 on a laptop because that's what this costs you can of course jump down to the $1100 base model but really that's not a laptop for content creation because it comes with just a quad-core processor in you have to rely on those integrated graphics but jumping up to some of those more powerful configurations you can go from the core i7 to the core 9 or from the 1080p to the 4k for $300 in either case so if you need to bring the price down to like 2200 dollars you can totally do the 8 core processor with the worst screen if you don't need those like really precise colors or vice versa you can do the 6 cores with a 4k screen either way you're getting a really powerful laptop and in either case you're getting 32 gigabytes of RAM and a terabyte of SSD storage that you can go up to 2 terabytes if you really need it I mean if you price a MacBook Pro at a similar configuration in terms of specs it's gonna be $1,000 more expensive so if you're comparing those two apples to apples you can obviously see the value get if you go with the XPS 15 now there is a possibility that next year we could get a totally new design from Dell I mean this is on its fourth iteration after all but if you're in the market right now if you're looking for a laptop that you can use for content creation the XPS 15 really is the best option you can get hey thanks for checking out this review leave us a comment below about what you think about the XPS 15 if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer some and also make sure to check out this video review of the MacBook Pro from earlier this year if you want to see how these laptops compare a little bit morewe all have different needs from our laptops but one that's increasing a lot these days is content creation whether that's video editing 3d rendering programming or photography if you're doing any of this stuff professionally or even just as a serious hobby you're gonna need a powerful laptop that can actually do that work and that means a high core count processor a discrete graphics card and maybe even a really color accurate display all that stuff is hard to find in one place but my friends this is the new XPS 15 that we're reviewing today and I think it just might have all of that in one package if you're familiar with the XPS 15 the 2019 model doesn't really have any surprises in terms of the look this is actually the fourth iteration of this same design they've been using since 2015 so these is the combination of aluminum on the lid and the bottom for that strong sense of rigidity and then the black carbon fiber on the keyboard deck not only does the carbon fiber look great it also keeps things really clean at least compared to like a glossy plastic or even like the soft touch matte black of the razor blade which honestly you get fingerprints on it within minutes of taking it out of the box so even though it's getting a little familiar at this point I still like this design a lot I mean those thin bezels around the display still look great you know Dells always been an industry leader in terms of that and this time around they've even gone through the effort of shrinking down the webcam to fit it above the screen that was you know the biggest complaint about this laptop and the XPS the routine over the years is that you had the nose cam underneath and display that's all taken care of this time without growing the bezel much at all on the top and that's really cool a couple small things to mention about the design of the XPS 15 versus the new XPS 13 is that you don't get the new color options so you don't get that frost white that they use on the XPS 13 that I actually really like I wish they had brought that over to the 15 inch model and then also the hinge it's still really difficult to open that was something they fixed on the XPS 13 but this is something that requires two hands unfortunately so while that keeps the screen from wobbling it does make it kind of in convenient but in 2019 it's really all about the screen on the XPS 15 of course you can still get the standard 1080p led model but what we've got here is the brand-new OLED 4k screen courtesy of Samsung's AMOLED panels and not only is this the best of these new OLED laptops that have this exact same panel it's also the straight-up best laptop screen we've ever tested now you might be wondering what I mean by that since all these laptops that use OLED panels this year come from the exact same manufacturer Samsung and it's the exact same panel actually so shouldn't they be the same well yes but the implementation and the calibration of these pales varies wildly from system to system so so far I've tested the razor blade to OLED as well as the Alienware m15 Zola and the XPS 15 is by far the best of the three it's less saturated and bold and it's a whole lot less reflective even though it's still a glossy panel the other ones are actually crazy reflective and I found myself staring back on myself a lot less on the XPS 15 and I like those screens the XPS 15 is really really color accurate because they tone down some of that boldness and saturation it supports the widest color game impossible with a laptop screen with a hundred percent on srgb and Adobe RGB and obviously the contrast is just wild because of how deep those blacks are with OLED it is definitely a little bit warmer than a macbook pro screen but in the end it's a screen that you can trust with your edits so whether you're a photographer or a video editor that's a really important consideration to make when you're going out and buying a laptop another really important consideration for people in those fields are ports and fortunately the XPS 15 still has a lot of them so you have the option of two USB a ports an HDMI port a USB C Thunderbolt 3 port and most importantly a full size SD card slot which is going to be really helpful again if you're in that field and you need to throw some video or images onto a laptop quickly now let's talk about performance because there's been some confusion out there about what exactly the XPS 15 is trying to be and what it is not and let me just say this very clearly this is not a gaming laptop and you should not go into the purchase of the XPS 15 thinking that it is I mean the 4k screen locked at 60 Hertz should tell you that alone it does have a decent discrete graphics card option the GTX 1650 which is better than the previous generations but honestly in games you're still gonna be needing to reduce settings down to medium and that's at 1080p of course just to get some decent frame rates and that's because of how this laptop was built the size of it and because of how the system throttles performance so sure do some gaming on the side with this that'll totally work for this laptop but if you go into buying this thing as a dedicated gaming machine you're gonna be pretty disappointed what it is good at in fact what it's really really good at is video editing our unit comes with the ninth gen 8 core core and n processor and 32 gigabytes of RAM and seriously this thing can blow through premiere renders so fast way faster than you ever thought a laptop probably could so I did my typical test a two-minute clip rendered at 4k in pro res 42 in Premiere and just listened to the results that you get across these different machines so on the 2019 MacBook Pro that came with that same core iname processor it took this render ten and a half minutes on a 20-19 razor blade which comes with a six core processor but a better graphics card down to nine and a half minutes but check this out with the XPS 15 and whatever they're doing with the cooling here and the entire system working down to just under five minutes now if you were running that MacBook Pro with Final Cut you might see some different results there but in this particular scenario I was super impressed and it totally blew away my expectations about what this laptop failed to do we also tried some video encoding and handbrake and the XPS 15 was 15% faster than the MacBook Pro again same processors there in fact this was the fastest score we've ever seen on a laptop outside of the Alienware air hit 51m which is a huge gaming laptop that has a desktop processor in weighs eight nine pounds so still really impressive now battery life isn't this laptops greatest strength obviously it's got a 4k screen so you know that's gonna limit what it can do but honestly it's got six or seven hours in moderate to light usage and that's pretty good and you can still get the LED 1080p version which historically has been one of the best performers in terms of battery life so if you're specifically a video editor I can highly recommend the XPS 15 in this particular configuration with the OLED screen and the core I nine process it now you don't want spend $2,500 on a laptop because that's what this costs you can of course jump down to the $1100 base model but really that's not a laptop for content creation because it comes with just a quad-core processor in you have to rely on those integrated graphics but jumping up to some of those more powerful configurations you can go from the core i7 to the core 9 or from the 1080p to the 4k for $300 in either case so if you need to bring the price down to like 2200 dollars you can totally do the 8 core processor with the worst screen if you don't need those like really precise colors or vice versa you can do the 6 cores with a 4k screen either way you're getting a really powerful laptop and in either case you're getting 32 gigabytes of RAM and a terabyte of SSD storage that you can go up to 2 terabytes if you really need it I mean if you price a MacBook Pro at a similar configuration in terms of specs it's gonna be $1,000 more expensive so if you're comparing those two apples to apples you can obviously see the value get if you go with the XPS 15 now there is a possibility that next year we could get a totally new design from Dell I mean this is on its fourth iteration after all but if you're in the market right now if you're looking for a laptop that you can use for content creation the XPS 15 really is the best option you can get hey thanks for checking out this review leave us a comment below about what you think about the XPS 15 if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer some and also make sure to check out this video review of the MacBook Pro from earlier this year if you want to see how these laptops compare a little bit more\n"