Dell just released the dream monitor for video editors. It isn’t cheap, but it checks literally every single box you could ever have for editing and color grading, it can calibrate itself, and you can game on it too. This is the Dell U3226Q, and in this post I’m going to be reviewing it from the perspective of a video editor who also games some on the side.
Also, for the sake of ethics: this post is not paid or sponsored by Dell, but they did send me the monitor so I could make this review.
An Anti-Glare OLED Panel
Let’s start with the biggest reason to care about this monitor: it has an extremely color accurate OLED panel. If you want a cheaper way into OLED, I put a $700 MSI OLED up against the Apple Studio Display. Dell claims this is the world’s first OLED panel with an anti-glare, low reflection coating. That means it doesn’t have the glossy pop you’d get from an OLED with a glass screen, but as a professional who wants to minimize glare, if you work in a bright room this thing is going to block more light and be much easier to see. It also comes with a detachable monitor hood to cut back on even more light hitting the screen, which is great.
If you’ve never used an OLED before, just know that OLED is pretty much the peak of display technology right now. You get a virtually unlimited contrast ratio with bright highlights and perfectly dark shadows because the pixels themselves can turn completely off when showing black. There’s no halo or ghosting effect like you’d get on an IPS panel.
Everything in display technology has been moving toward OLED for years. Phones have used OLED displays for years. If you’re watching my YouTube video right now on your phone, you’re probably watching it on an OLED screen. OLED TVs are what most people want to buy, and I’ve personally had one for several years and love it.
So when I say this Dell monitor is designed to leverage all the strengths of an extremely high-quality OLED panel in ways that will truly benefit you as a video editor, including a bunch of features they aren’t even advertising, I mean it. This may be the last monitor you have to buy for a very long time.
Color Accuracy
Dell claims this monitor covers 100% of the sRGB color space and 99% of DCI-P3, both of which really matter for video editors. If you want those colors to survive the edit as well, I explain color management in DaVinci Resolve separately. When I tested it with my Spyder color calibrator, I’m happy to tell you those claims were accurate. This screen delivers extremely accurate colors that look exactly how they should.
But here’s the thing: even with an extremely color accurate monitor that comes calibrated from the factory, I always recommend color calibrating any screen you plan to use for color grading. Monitor colors shift over time, it’s just a fact of screen technology. Colors can get warmer or cooler, the tint can shift more red or green. I’ve literally had it happen where I went too long between color calibrations, rendered a video, played it back on another computer, and thought “wait, these colors look a little funky.” Then I’d need to recalibrate to get things back to normal.
And color calibration can be a pain. You have to buy a color calibrator for a few hundred bucks, install the software, and then every few months remember to reconnect the calibrator and rerun the calibration. Most calibration software has a little nagging pop-up that appears to remind you, and I have lost count of the number of times I closed one of those pop-ups because I didn’t have time to deal with it.
And don’t even get me started on managing monitor ICC profiles and making sure each monitor is using the correct one, because you wake up one day and your operating system has chosen a different one for some reason and everything looks completely different until you track down the problem.
Let me know in the comments if you identify with that annoyance, because here’s where this monitor blows your mind.
The Built-In Color Calibrator
If you’ve been wondering why the bottom bezel on this monitor looks slightly thicker with a weird cut-out rectangle, strap in.
With this Dell OLED, you do not need to go out and spend hundreds of dollars on a separate color calibration tool and awkwardly dangle it over the front of your screen. This monitor has one built in, and it is so cool.
Whenever you want, you can press the joystick on the back of the monitor to open the menu, select calibrate, and the monitor will pop out a tiny motorized camera on a stick from the base. It analyzes the pixels on the screen and color calibrates itself at a hardware level.
What does hardware level mean? There are two types of color calibration: software and hardware. Software is where you buy a separate calibration tool, plug it into your computer’s USB port, install software, and whenever you calibrate, the results are saved as one of those annoying .icc files where you’re at the mercy of your operating system to actually use them correctly.
Hardware calibration is completely different. When you calibrate the monitor, the result is saved as a look-up table (LUT) to the monitor itself rather than to your computer. You don’t need any software on your computer for it to work. And if you switch between using a laptop and a desktop, you don’t need to have color calibration software installed on both machines. Just plug either one into the monitor and it’s going to display accurate colors, because those colors are saved to the monitor, not the individual computer.
Pretty cool, right? It absolutely blew my mind when that little camera stick popped out for the first time.
But we’re not done with the annoyance-fixing, because half the pain of color calibrating is the external calibrator and software, but the other half is just remembering to actually do it. Remember that annoying pop-up reminding you every few months?
Here’s what I think is truly magical about this monitor: you can set it to color calibrate itself on a schedule, completely automatically, with no input required from you at all. You can schedule it to calibrate every 200 hours, or quarterly, monthly, weekly, or even daily depending on how color-critical your work is.
You literally never have to think about color calibrating your screen again. Every time you sit down to color grade, you know the colors are accurate because the monitor has been keeping itself calibrated. Suddenly this monitor’s price starts to seem a lot more justified, doesn’t it?
Color Space Support
None of that would matter if the monitor didn’t support the color spaces you actually use when color grading, and that’s another area where this monitor feels purpose-built for video editors.
Open the menu and you’ll find presets for digital cinema like DCI-P3 with gamma 2.4 and 2.2, presets for YouTube like sRGB, photography with Adobe RGB, and broadcast video standards like Rec.709 and Rec.2020. There is so much control here, and it’s far more advanced than just picking “vivid” or “flat” on another monitor.
And then there’s HDR. It supports multiple flavors: HDR10 and HLG both with 1000 nits of brightness, Dolby Vision, and DisplayHDR True Black 500, a display standard designed for extremely accurate shadow detail while still getting quite bright at 500 nits. If you want to color grade in both standard and high dynamic range, this monitor handles basically all of it.
Hidden Filmmaker Features
Are we done with video features? No, because there are hidden settings in the menu that I haven’t seen anybody talking about or Dell advertising anywhere, but that are going to be extremely useful if you’re a filmmaker.
Here’s the context: if you want to buy an OLED reference monitor for on-set use, SmallHD will happily sell you one for an eye-watering $13,000 at the time I’m writing this. You get stellar visual quality and all the extra software features you’d expect from SmallHD, like scopes, overlays, and markers. It’s great, but you pay a lot for it.
Now with that $13,000 price in your head, this Dell OLED comes in at roughly one-fifth of that price and includes masking and marker overlays.
You can go into the monitor settings to add a 2.35:1 overlay, a 4:3 overlay if you’re outputting open gate, and more. You can also enable a mask that dims the parts of the frame that won’t be included in the video if you’re filming in an aspect ratio like 2.35:1.
I genuinely don’t know why these features are included on this monitor, but I’m not complaining. It definitely doesn’t have the fancy SmallHD OS, but it also doesn’t have the price. I’m not saying you have to buy it for that reason, but it’s really interesting that Dell included it.
Gaming Performance
Usually with a higher-end video editing monitor you have to make compromises, where color accuracy is great but the refresh rate is terrible. I’ve seen monitors with good colors that maxed out at 30hz or 60hz.
This Dell OLED combines an extremely color accurate and vibrant HDR screen with a 120hz refresh rate, 0.3ms response time, and VRR support. For most people who want to edit videos and game on the side, you’re going to be really happy with it.
To be clear, it’s not going to keep up with the more gaming-focused OLED monitors out there today with refresh rates at 240hz or higher, but those gaming monitors don’t offer the same level of color accuracy and built-in hardware color calibrators either.
Ports and Build Quality
A monitor is only as good as the ports it has, and you don’t have to worry here. You get 2 HDMI 2.1 ports, 1 DisplayPort 1.4 port, 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, plus a full USB hub with USB-C and USB-A ports that pop out of a hidden cavity on the back. It also has a 2.5 gigabit ethernet port, really rounding out the hub experience. It comes with a DisplayPort cable, HDMI cable, and USB-C cable in the box.
The stand is sturdy with no wobble, and it can rotate, raise and lower, and tilt vertically. Controls are minimalistic: a power button and a joystick on the back that doubles as a button, plus three capacitive buttons on the bottom left of the bezel that you can assign to whatever you want for quick access.
The only thing missing is speakers, but honestly monitor speakers are bad 99% of the time anyway, so it’s not a big loss.
Burn-In: Should You Be Worried?
Let’s talk about the one concern you might have with an OLED monitor, and that’s burn-in. This is where a static image on screen becomes permanently visible, even when you’re doing something else. If you have grandparents who always have the news on, you may have seen this where the TV looks like it permanently has a news ticker at the bottom even when you change the channel.
With OLED screens, burn-in was more of a problem in the past due to the fragile nature of organic pixels. That said, in the last 5 to 10 years, burn-in reduction technology has gotten significantly better. TVs and monitors now have special refresh modes that run when the screen is off to help keep pixels from burning in.
This Dell monitor offers a pixel refresh feature that automatically runs whenever it goes into standby mode, and by default forces a pixel refresh every 24 hours. You can even set it to every 12 hours if you want to be extra careful.
My OLED TV has had zero burn-in issues after years of regular use. That said, a computer monitor is different from a TV because you’re more likely to leave it on all day displaying a static image like a dock at the bottom of the screen. This monitor has additional burn-in protections for that, including the ability to dim the screen or even dim only static areas like where the dock sits.
My recommendation if you’re worried about burn-in: hide your dock and menus until you mouse over them, set your desktop wallpaper to rotate through different images, and set your monitor to turn off when you’re not using it. Do those things and I would really not expect any issues, because the monitor will refresh its pixels whenever it’s off.
Should You Buy the Dell U3226Q?
Let’s talk price. This monitor comes in at $2,600 at the time of writing, which is on the higher end for a professional monitor before you get into ultra-niche reference monitors that cost $10,000, $20,000, or $30,000.
Here’s something I’ve found to be true in my technology-loving life: once you go OLED, you won’t go back. I feel the same way about this monitor as I did when I bought my first OLED TV. The contrast is too perfect, the colors are too good. Pointing a camera at it can’t do it justice, you really have to see it with your own eyes, and once you do and get used to editing on it, you won’t ever want to go back.
The good news is that OLED monitors keep dropping in price. You can get an extremely color accurate OLED for around $500 to $1,000 right now that will work great for color grading. But those budget OLEDs won’t have nearly the same features that make your life easier as a professional.
You’ll still need to color calibrate your monitor. You can buy a separate calibration tool and try to remember to do it every few months, or you can buy this Dell and have it calibrate itself automatically as often as you want, to the exact color space you’re editing in. It supports more color space presets than most monitors. Throw in the markers and overlays for different video aspect ratios, and this Dell OLED makes a really compelling argument for the price.
It’s going to save you time as an editor. And if your time is money, which I know most professionals feel strongly about, I think the Dell U3226Q is the monitor you should buy.
I’ll link to where I found the best price for this monitor down below, along with my monitor buyer guide to help you save time and money. And if you’re a video editor, check out my Edit Videos Like a Pro guide as well, which is completely free to download.
