A Review of the Dell – Inspiron 15.6? 4K Ultra HD Touch-Screen Laptop 7000 7548 series

Both highly affordable and a high performer, the Dell Inspiron 15.6” Ultra HD 4K Touch screen laptop offers an excellent all-around workhorse laptop package in a very compact design. This machine isn’t a 4K gaming laptop by design and it doesn’t pretend to be one either in any aspect of its specs or physical appearance.

Instead, the Inspiron 4K Touch is a functional, high performing work machine that has been built with professional and home users in mind, except that it also offers the massive pixel density and excellent vibrancy of 4K resolution as a bonus feature. Naturally, to make this massive display resolution run smoothly, the Inspiron 4K Touch also includes some excellent GPU and CPU specs as well as a powerful memory and storage space. However, unlike other 4K laptops on the market, the 4K Inspiron does not try to claim or even match the kind of specs needed for actually using it as a 4K PC gameplay machine. Visually oriented pro users like graphic designers take note however, because this is still a great laptop for your needs.

The single best feature of the Inspiron 4K Touch is that it offers a premium roster of features at a genuinely excellent price tag that’s fundamentally affordable even by the standards of ordinary 4K notebooks. When you consider that it also offers a 4K screen and some excellent processing/storage specs to go with it at this price, then the cost of the Inspiron 4K Touch seems downright excellent.

Then there is that 4K display itself. It truly creates a spectacular level of detail smoothness in a screen this small. Packing just over 8.2 million pixels into a 15.6 inch screen will create a PPI (pixels per inch) so tight that you won’t see digital pixilation no matter how closely you look at the screen when it’s displaying native 4K graphics or graphics that scale to 4K.

Finally, the specs on the Inspiron 4K Touch are genuinely excellent. This machine comes with an excellent IPS panel display with fantastic viewing angles, a powerful Core i7 dual core processor from Intel’s superb Broadwell family of CPUs and also features a powerful AMD Radeon 4GB video card that manages the 4K smoothly for anything except high intensity stuff like gaming.

Check the Price of the Dell - Inspiron 15.6" 4K Ultra HD Touch-Screen Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 12GB Memory - 1TB Hard Drive on Amazon: 

4.0 - 1 Review

There is genuinely very little to call “bad” in the Inspiron 4K Touch. This is an across the board high performer and since it doesn’t lay claim to being a 4K gaming laptop, we can’t even really criticize it for not being able to deliver the goods in this regard either.

That said, the dual-core i7 processor could have used an upgrade to a Quad-core model for even smoother CPU power and the AMD Radeon R7 270 video card in the Inspiron 4K is definitely not one of AMD’s more powerful cards when it comes to dealing with 4K graphics.

Finally, the physically design of the Inspiron 4K Touch, while being very professional and conservative in a way some might find appealing, is also rather boring. Dell could have put a little more aesthetic kick into this notebook then they did.

Type: midsize
Screen size: 15.6 inches
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Resolution: 3840 x 2160
Included OS: Windows 8.1 (now available in Windwows 10)
Battery life: roughly 8 hours (According to Dell, more like 5 hours in live testing)
Processor: Intel Core i7 2.4 – 3.0 GHz Dual Core
RAM: 16GB
Weight: 4.65 lbs
Storage (Hard drive): 1 TB HDD / 256GB SSD
GPU (Video card): AMD Radeon R7 M265 4GB DDR3
Connectivity: WiFi, Ethernet, Bluetooth, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, 2 x USB 3.0 ports, 1 x USB 2.0, HDMI 1.4a, Headphone/microphone jack, built-in webcam

The display on the Dell Inspiron 4K Touch 7000 7548 series laptop offers a great configuration and overall quality. Thanks to the IPS panel technology used in the screen, you get a mix of both vibrant color, decent contrast at 400:1 and, most importantly, great off-center viewing clarity –though this isn’t normally a major issue in a PC screen where most viewing is done from front and center. Furthermore, the 4K ultra hd resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels spread across only 15.6 diagonal inches of screen means one fantastic pixel density of 282 PPI in which no amount of squinting in anyone without literal eagle vision will be able to note pixilation.
The color gamut coverage on the Inspiron Touch is also very high. While there are pro 4K PC monitors that can do quite a bit better, the IPS screen on this notebook still more than delivers on high quality settings. sRGB coverage sits at roughly 95% and even AdobeRGB coverage was rated at a relatively decent 74%. Furthermore, color accuracy is excellent, with a Delta-E of 2.61 without calibration and a post-calibration Delta-E of 1.96.

As for brightness, the Inspiron Touch 4K screen also delivers very nice results, with an overall screen brightness of roughly 297cd/m2 and a Gamma of 2.20, meaning some excellent brightness across all the colors on the screen’s spectrum. Contrast levels, at 400:1 aren’t as good as those found in stand-alone PC monitors of a professional type but this contrast isn’t terrible either.

The audio on the Dell Inspiron Touch 7548 series is above standard issue good as far as laptop audio averages go. Basically, this laptop produces an abnormally high quality of sound for such a compact unit and the result is a pleasant surprise to behold for ordinary listening. However, if you want to enjoy truly high end audio for your music and online videos, a high quality set of external speakers is recommended. The Inspiron Touch may have great sound for a laptop but we’re still talking about laptop sound quality here.

The overall design of the Inspiron 7548 can best be described as sleek, elegant and….. boring. This is a wonderfully compact laptop, it would look great and perfectly at home in any office or home work studio setting and it is very conservative because of this. Thus, if you’re looking for something a bit cooler and more stylish, go for a more gaming oriented 4K laptop like the Lenovo Y50 Touch 4K or maybe a machine from Alienware.

However, there is a lot going for this compact notebook. It’s very thin to start with, with a profile of just 19.9 mm at its thickest point and a very nicely light weight of just 4.61 lbs. Considering the GPU and CPU power the Inspiron manages to contain, it’s compactness is all the more impressive.

The top surface of the Inspiron’s lid is made out of anodized aluminum with a metallic coloration, which gives the whole device a more professional, solid feel thanks to the metal. Furthermore, right above the screen, there is the built-in webcam and the microphone as well. Below this, there is a polycarbonate main body whose construction material somewhat imitates the feel of anodized aluminum, further cementing the robust impression this laptop gives.

Along the sides are all the connectivity ports and these are surrounded by a rather stylish looking curved edging. As for the interior of the laptop, it’s again made of anodized aluminum, with a strong grey/black color and here is also where we find the one physical feature of the Inspiron 7548 that’s a blemish on an otherwise very functional design: the keyboard is really too damn small to be very practical for prolonged work. Dell gives too much open space to the blank inner surface of the Inspiron and the tiny keyboard seems to sort of lay in the middle of it almost as an afterthought.

The Dell Inspiron 7548 originally came with Windows 8.1 pre-installed, and while this was pretty good from a 4K display point of view (Windows 8.1 is the first OS to scale decently with 4K displays), the newest version on sale right now is being delivered with Windows 10, which is even better given that it has been designed with much greater consciousness of 4K resolution in display devices.

The Dell Inspiron 7548 suffers from a really unsatisfyingly small keyboard for such an otherwise well-designed laptop. Furthermore, the overall design of this machine is definitely not exciting to look at in any way.

Aside from these flaws, there is also the lower-end GPU that’s definitely not up to the standards of4K gaming and finally, all that 4K resolution on the screen can really drain the battery, causing it to die within 4K hours if you’re doing anything that’s graphics-intensive.

The Dell Inspiron 15.6" 4K Ultra HD Touch-Screen Laptop 7000 7548 series is currently selling on Amazon.com for $1,159.99. An excellent price for what this 4K UHD laptop offers.

Check the Price of the Dell - Inspiron 15.6" 4K Ultra HD Touch-Screen Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 12GB Memory - 1TB Hard Drive on Amazon: 

4.0 - 1 Review