I have to say that this one is more than a little disappointing. Brad Sams over at Thurrott.com got some time with the Dell Canvas, which is supposed to fill the same niche as Microsoft’s Surface Studio, just as a peripheral instead of a whole PC. In short, he came out of his experience luke-warm on the product, complaining about the screen quality and input latency.
While he spent quite a bit of time complaining about Dell choosing a lower-resolution panel for the Canvas, I’m not really sure that matters too much from a practical standpoint. I see game artists and other designers considering this device, over the Surface Studio, if they require the performance of a full desktop with one or more discrete, add-in board graphics cards. I could see complaint about color accuracy, and if the Dell Canvas is weak in that regard, then I could see that being a problem, especially for those who print their illustrations. If it’s just resolution, then I would guess that there would be some who would happily choose 1440p over a laptop GPU. It’s a display for input, not content consumption or even full-resolution preview.
This brings us to the other complaint: Input Latency. From what I see in the video, he could have a point there. Some actions, like turning the dial, seem to keep up with him, but a few pen strokes look like they lag behind. I would like to see a handful of artists use it and see if it’s noticeable, but, if it is, that could be a massive deal-breaker. At the same time, my Cintiq 22HD looks like it lags too, but is comfortable to use, so it might be fine.
The Dell Canvas is launching on March 30th for $1,799 USD.
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Where resolution would matter
Where resolution would matter would be video production, where 4k is becoming a norm.
The Surface Studio’s monitor has a great resolution for this as you can preview the video full resolution with all the controls on screen.
Dell has actually narrowed the marketability of this device, by choosing not to have at least the option of a higher res screen.