I bought a Dell-branded product this afternoon. That was a mistake I will not repeat.
Summary: the 2713UM only reaches its rated 2560×1440 resolution when connected via DVI-D. On HDMI it is limited to 1920×1080; on VGA to 2048×1152. 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 2560×1440 over any of these cables.
Two things make this extra infuriating:
I spent more than four hours on the phone with three different Dell technical-support people to find out that not only don’t they know how to fix this, nobody can give any reason for it. It’s a completely arbitrary, senseless limit. The monitor’s EDID hardware apparently tells lies to the host system that low-ball its capabilities. This couldn’t happen by accident; somebody designed in this nonsense.
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’s own technical support people haven’t been clued in either. Bait and switch taken to a whole new level.
(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.)
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.
She declined to send me $400 so I wouldn’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.
Dell. You pay more, but you’ll get less. Pass it on.
(Yes, I typoed the model number originally.)