Dell G2725D  Monitor Review

This monitor has a very simple design with basic black plastic and a tripod stand. The physical bezels are thin on three sides, with a thicker bottom bezel.

The build quality is mediocre. The plastic materials feel cheap, and the monitor wobbles easily. Even the OSD buttons are stiff and can take some time getting used to.

This is the third unit that we bought and tested. The first two units stopped working when we tried calibrating them. If you experience the same thing, let us know in the comments.

The ergonomics are terrible. You can only tilt it, and the monitor wobbles easily when you try to adjust it. It doesn't offer any cable management either.

The monitor has four buttons to control the OSD and a power button, and they feel stiff to use.

• DisplayPort cable
• Power cable
• 2x screws for the stand
• User documentation

The contrast ratio is decent. While it's better than most IPS displays, blacks still look gray next to bright highlights.

Settings

• Preset Mode: Standard (after calibration)
• Color Adjust: User Color
• Brightness: Max (100)

The SDR brightness is great. It gets bright enough to fight glare in a well-lit room, and it maintains its brightness consistently across different content.

The Dell G2725D doesn't support HDR.

The horizontal viewing angle is okay. It's worse than most IPS panels, and the image quickly gets darker from the sides. This makes it hard to share your screen with someone next to you.

The vertical viewing angle is unremarkable. The image washes out and gets darker if you're standing up and looking down at the monitor.

The gray uniformity is decent. While the edges of the screen are darker with vignetting, there's minimal dirty screen effect in the center, which is good.

The black uniformity is disappointing. There's noticeable clouding and backlight bleed throughout the screen.

The accuracy before calibration is good. Despite not having a dedicated sRGB mode, it locks colors well to the sRGB color space. It also has good gamma tracking, but the white balance is disappointing, and the color temperature is cool, resulting in a blue tint. As you can see in alternative graphs, the white balance and color accuracy are a bit better if you set Color Accuracy to 'Normal,' but then you can't adjust the RGB settings.

The accuracy after calibration is amazing. It fixes most issues, but we didn't create an ICC profile for this unit, because creating an ICC profile for the first two units that we bought caused the monitors to stop working. This is why this unit doesn't have an ICC profile, and the accuracy after calibration isn't as good as on some other monitors.

The SDR color gamut is fantastic. It displays a wide range of colors in the sRGB color space but is more limited in Adobe RGB and has some oversaturated and undersaturated colors in both.

The Dell G2725D gaming monitor doesn't support HDR.

The Dell 27 Gaming Monitor G2725D doesn't support HDR.

The text clarity is good. Text looks sharp, and enabling Windows ClearType (top photo) helps improve the clarity. These photos are in Windows 10, and you can also see them in Windows 11 with ClearType on and with ClearType off.

The direct reflection handling is decent. The matte coating absorbs light well, but remaining light spreads out across the screen.

The black levels rise a bit in bright rooms, and combined with its low native contrast ratio, blacks look gray even in well-lit environments.

There's some noticeable light coming off the screen in a bright room. While it's fine if you have some lights around, avoid placing it opposite a sunny window.

The gradient handling is fantastic. Although there's a bit of banding in darker shades, it's hard to tell.

Due to bandwidth limitations over HDMI, you can only get the max refresh rate with a DisplayPort connection. However, if you want another cheap monitor with a higher 280Hz max refresh rate, look into the Dell G2524H.

The motion handling across the VRR range is good. The 'Off,' '1,' and '2' Response Time settings are consistent across the refresh rate range, but there's more inverse ghosting at low refresh rates. The '3' setting is so bad that it passes the limits of our chart, as you can see in an alternative chart.

We also noticed that the Response Time settings sometimes didn't perform as expected, or changed in the middle of testing.

The refresh rate compliance is decent. While its response time isn't fast enough to make full color transitions before the monitor draws the next frame at high frame rates, it's better at lower frame rates.

The CAD at the max refresh rate is decent. There's a bit of blur and inverse ghosting with the '2' Response Time setting, but 'Off' and '1' have more blur, while '3' has more inverse ghosting. If you're looking for a monitor with better motion handling, check out the Acer Nitro XZ322QU V3bmiiphx.

The CAD at 120Hz is decent. There's blur but less inverse ghosting than at its max refresh rate. The overdrive settings also perform differently if the signal is at 120Hz, even with VRR enabled, than if it starts at a higher refresh rate and goes down to 120Hz, as you can see in VRR Motion Performance. Because of this, the '3' Response Time setting has less inverse ghosting, but there's still blur.

The CAD at 60Hz is okay. There's noticeable blur with any of the Response Time settings, but they have less inverse ghosting than if you were to start at a high refresh rate and use VRR to go down to 60Hz.

This monitor doesn't have a backlight strobing feature to reduce persistence blur.

This monitor doesn't have any noticeable VRR flicker with changing frame rates. The included video represents what you see in person for both dark and bright scenes.

The backlight is flicker-free, which helps reduce eye strain if you're sensitive to it.

The monitor has low input lag for a responsive feel at high refresh rates, but it's less responsive at 60Hz.

Although Dell advertises HDMI 2.1 ports, they're still limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, which we confirmed.

This monitor doesn't have any compatibility issues with macOS but can't take advantage of all its features. If you're using a MacBook and close the lid, the screen goes to sleep, and windows return to their original position when reopening the lid.

This monitor comes with limited features, but it still has a few:

• Audio Adjustment: Allows you to change the volume of the headphones connected to the audio jack.
• ComfortView: Limits blue light to help reduce eye strain.
• DCR: Helps make the screen brighter.

You can read more about the OSD in the user manual.