Dell XPS 15 9500 review: the photo editor’s new friend

Dell’s XPS 15 laptops continue to be crowd pleasers. With its eye-catching, slim new design and photo-editing-friendly performance, display and feature set, the latest 15-inch model can hold its own as a less powerful — much cheaper — alternative to a MacBook Pro ($2,399 at Apple) 16. It’s well worth a look if that’s how you roll, though you might want to consider the new 17-inch XPS 17 instead for the bigger screen. Both are still premium-priced, and likely not worth the money if all you need is a pretty work clamshell, not a serious workhorse. 

The configuration we tested runs about $2,255; if you don’t need color accuracy, want better battery life and can live without the slightly-better-than 4K UHD resolution, you can save almost $300 by going for the lower-resolution option. The base configuration costs about $1,300 and comes with an Intel Core i5-10300H, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD and the 1,900 x 1,200 display. That’s a pretty big range for a single laptop model. 

Something in me cringes at the idea of paying $1,300 for a system with only 8GB RAM and integrated graphics, though, so if you’re leaning towards that I suggest you consider something like the Lenovo C740; the processor is a lot less powerful, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pair a powerful CPU with so little memory. You can get an otherwise similar configuration of the C740, which is also sleek and about the same weight, for well under $1,000.

If you’re considering it for anything beyond casual photo editing, though, do yourself a favor and spring for 32GB RAM and an i7 CPU. My consistent experience is that if you need to multitask, then operations like mass thumbnail generation, which takes advantage of high core counts, can become bottlenecked by memory (at least on Windows). And applications like Adobe’s Lightroom Classic will use all the cores you can throw at it for some operations.

Dell redesigned the XPS 15 (and introduced a new 17-inch model) for 2020 to align more with the XPS 13, mostly. For one thing, that means the XPS 15 ditched its 4K OLED option. It gets a little complicated after that. The XPS 13’s display has a 16:10 aspect ratio, which means both the XPS 15 and 17 follow suit. The problem is that standard OLED panels only come in standard 4K UHD 16:9 aspect, so the XPS switched to a nonstandard 4K “UHD Plus” (3,840×2,160 pixels) and a base “FHD Plus” (1,980×1,200 pixels).

I like the UHD Plus screen more than the OLED, though, especially for photo editing, which is arguably the creative work that this system is optimized for. It has better color consistency and tonal range in the shadows, and as tested it covers 100 percent of Adobe RGB rather than P3, which is still a respectable 94 percent. (We test screens using using Portrait Displays’ Calman 5 Ultimate and an X-Rite i1Display Pro Plus.) If you don’t know what all this color gamut talk is about, this may not be the laptop for you. 

Oddly, Dell doesn’t promote accuracy as one of the virtues of the screen, and out of the box it wasn’t, despite the inclusion of PremierColor, Dell’s color management software. But with some easy tweaks to the brightness and gamma settings in PremierColor, I was able to get it to to standard target values of 2.2 gamma, delta E for grayscale and color less than or equal to 2 and white point of 6500K. It can’t hit the effectively zero nits black (and therefore infinite contrast, since that puts zero in the denominator of the contrast calculation) but its roughly 1560:1 contrast is good for IPS. 

It also supports HDR, though with a maximum brightness of roughly 465 nits it won’t really wow you. And playback of 4K HDR content really taxes the integrated graphics; I couldn’t successfully force it to use the GTX 1650 Ti all the time.

More notably, unlike many consumer calibrated displays, Dell’s factory calibrated profiles actually clip the gamut boundaries to the color space; in other words, for example, even though the display can produce colors well outside sRGB, it won’t if you’ve opted to use the sRGB color profile. That’s really helpful if you need to check out-of-gamut colors. You can create custom profiles with a calibrator using PremierColor as well, but only with the very popular X-Rite i1Display Pro; it doesn’t even support the Plus yet, so I couldn’t test it. (If you want to calibrate it using your own software and a different calibrator, remember to turn PremierColor off.)

PremierColor gives you the standard set of color profiles, including Rec 709 (HD) and Rec 601 (SD), as well as settings for specific color temperatures and relative scales for gamma, contrast and black level. It also lets you choose from different viewing conditions, such as daylight or incandescent light. 

A downside to the ever-shrinking screen bezels is you have to be careful when adjusting the display; for instance, while trying to find the perfect angle I accidentally touched the touchscreen and closed Chrome. (I think a touchscreen is unnecessary here, anyway. And I’d gladly trade a millimeter more of top bezel for a better webcam.

Other tradeoffs of the new, thinner design is swapping USB-A and HDMI connections for all-USB-C/Thunderbolt 3. The XPS 15 has two Thunderbolt 3 connections, which is nice. But losing a display connection on the discrete GPU bus means you sacrifice some flexibility. It does (thankfully) retain the SD card slot, though. Dell grew the touchpad and moved the speakers to either side of the keyboard, both welcome changes. I don’t like the unlabeled, unilluminated power button: It has a fingerprint reader built in, but in the dark it’s just a blank spot and seems to scream “why do you want to turn me off?”

One thing Dell didn’t sacrifice is speed, sort of. It stuck with the Intel H series processor where a lot of slim competitors use the lower-power (and therefore slower) U series. But it also tops out with the GeForce GTX 1650 Ti; a 6GB 1660 Ti, like the Surface Book 3 has, might have given it extra 2GB memory needed to let it run some professional graphics applications or a little extra needed oomph for video editing. It does let Dell differentiate between the XPS 15 and XPS 17 for something other than size, though.

The battery life is solid relative to the rest of its class at a little over eight hours, at least for streaming video. It also held up pretty well under my more punishing real-like workload, lasting about five hours of active use (though no imaging apps). That’s a pretty long time for me, though it ran too hot to keep it on my lap for that long.

The new design for the XPS 15 acquits itself well, and Dell didn’t make any major mistakes with it (along the lines of the bottom-dwelling webcam). But as a general-purpose work laptop, it’s not super light, doesn’t have a super long battery life, isn’t super thin, super-fast or super cheap. It’s not a work laptop superhero, just a premium workhorse.