Dell UltraSharp 2713 monitor &#8211; bait and switch warning
<p>I bought a Dell-branded product this afternoon.  That was a mistake I will not repeat.</p>
<p>Summary: the 2713UM only reaches its rated 2560&#215;1440 resolution when connected via DVI-D. On HDMI it is limited to 1920&#215;1080; on VGA to 2048&#215;1152.  This $700 and supposedly professional-grade monitor is thus functionally inferior to the $300 Auria I still have connected to the other head of the same video card, which does 2560&#215;1440 over any of these cables.</p>
<p>Two things make this extra infuriating:</p>
<p>I spent more than four hours on the phone with three different Dell technical-support people to find out that not only don&#8217;t they know how to fix this, <em>nobody can give any reason for it</em>.  It&#8217;s a completely arbitrary, senseless limit.  The monitor&#8217;s EDID hardware apparently tells lies to the host system that low-ball its capabilities.  This couldn&#8217;t happen by accident; somebody <em>designed in</em> this nonsense.</p>
<p>And then neglected to tell potential customers about it. Nothing anywhere in the promotional material for this monitor even hints at these limits, and Dell&#8217;s own technical support people haven&#8217;t been clued in either.  Bait and switch taken to a whole new level.</p>
<p>(Why did I buy a Dell product?  Because it was the only thing I could get my hands on same-day that matched the specs of my other Auria, which went flickery-crazy early this afternoon.)</p>
<p>When I unloaded about this on Tech Support Guy #3, he passed me to a marketing representative.  I explained, relatively politely under the circumstances, that I has over 15K social-media followers and was planning to give Dell a public black eye over their repeated bungling unless somebody gave me a really good reason not to.  </p>
<p>She declined to send me $400 so I wouldn&#8217;t have been taken worse than by buying another Auria, then passed me to somebody she described as a manager. But I could tell by the accent he was just another drone in a call center in East Fuckistan who had neither the ability nor the intention to improve my day. After two more iterations of this I had had enough and hung up.</p>
<p>Dell.  You pay more, but you&#8217;ll get less.  Pass it on.</p>
<p>(Yes, I typoed the model number originally.)</p>
