Dell Latitude 7420 14 Inch FHD Business Laptop, Intel Core i7-1185G7 (4.8 Ghz), 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Win10 Pro, (Black)

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Idle runtime at minimum brightness (still readable, 22 cd/m²) is over 23 hours. Here, the competition lasts just as long or longer. This runtime has little significance for practical use, which is why it is not available for all models. The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light. Our “Design and Gaming” profile delivers optimal color temperature (6500K) at 140 cd/m2 luminance and sRGB gamma mode. I've appeared on CBS News, in USA Today, and at many other outlets to offer analysis on breaking technology news.

In my benchmarks, the 1145 tended to run 10 to 20 percent slower than the 1185-based systems, which wasn’t a surprise. On tougher tests, transcoding a 4K video to FHD took 3 hours and 15 minutes on the 7420 compared with two hours and 32 minutes on the 9420. A big Excel data table took 46 minutes to run, compared with about 41 on the other systems; and a MatLab portfolio simulation took 52 minutes, compared with 47-49 minutes on the others. One important thing to note: even this slower Tiger Lake chip performed notably better than the high-end 14nm Comet Lake chips that were in this class of machine a year ago. When I tested last year’s Latitude 7410 with a four core/eight thread Core i7-10610, the Excel data table took 63 minutes and the MatLab simulation took 73 minutes; so the difference is significant. Typical users should be quite pleased with the performance.Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

The built-in speakers are adequate, despite some distortion at higher volumes, but since the audio is more satisfactory when using a decent set of headphones, my inclination would be to use the speakers only in a pinch. Dell does offer an optional Dell Mobile Adapter Speakerphone that might be just the thing for frequent conference-callers. As far as performance goes, the unit I had was based on an Intel Core i5-1145G7 processor (Tiger Lake), which has four cores and eight threads, with a rated speed of 2.6 GHz and a maximum turbo speed of 4.4 GHz, manufactured on Intel’s 10 nm SuperFin process. You can get it with the higher-end Core i7-1185, which has a base speed of 3.0 GHz and a turbo of 4.8 GHz, which is what the higher-spec laptops I’ve been testing this year have had. Both processors have integrated graphics and support vPro, Intel's enterprise management feature. The unit I used had 16GB of memory and a 512GB solid-state drive, similar to the others. Before I joined the tech-journalism ranks, I wrote on topics as diverse as Borneo's rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and Big Data's role in presidential elections. A graduate of Middlebury College, I also have a master's degree in journalism and French Studies from New York University.Those looking for the best possible performance are not well advised with this SoC. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon gets 8 to 20% more performance out of the nominally weaker i5-1135G7, as Cinebench R15 and R20 show. It is also worth mentioning that Dell offers the Latitude 14 7420 in both Carbon and Aluminum outfits, both of which feel premium enough. Dell: Dell is a U.S. manufacturer (based in Texas) of computer hardware founded in 1984 and is one of the largest international manufacturers in terms of both market share and notebook models. Its product line includes desktops, notebooks, storage systems, monitors, servers, printers, consumer electronics and peripherals. Dell offers laptops that are suitable for various applications, such as business laptops, gaming laptops, ultra portables and workstations. Dell's business laptops from the Latitude and Precision series are an option for professional users and businesses.

The results of our Handbrake video editing trial are clustered close together, and although the Latitude 7420 tied for last place the differences were negligible. Handbrake is another tough, threaded workout that's highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better. Storage performance as measured by PCMark 8 proved roughly equal across the Latitude 7420 and its competitors, since they all use speedy SSDs as their boot drives. The maximum measured brightness is 435 nits (cd/m2) in the middle of the screen and 414 nits (cd/m2) average across the surface with a maximum deviation of 9%. The Correlated Color Temperature on a white screen and at maximum brightness is 6600K (average) – ever so slightly colder than the 6500K optimum for sRGB. The unit I tried had a 2.1-megapixel 1080p webcam with a proximity sensor. I was a bit disappointed in the camera—even though it’s higher resolution than the 720p cameras I see on a lot of machines, the video was a bit softer in focus and had more of a tendency to whiteout than I’d like. It's adequate, but the cameras in the machines I've most recently tested from both Lenovo and HP are better than what I've seen from Dell. Despite this very credible set of features, the display limits an otherwise excellent system. Screen brightness came in at around 277 nits at 100% brightness, the lowest of our comparison units. Plus, our Datacolor Spyder tests showed the Inspiron 14's panel covering only 64% of the sRGB gamut and 48% of the Adobe RGB gamut, also lowest in our comparison group. (More on this later.)

Overall, even to the naked eye, colors seem somewhat faded, and both brightness and saturation could use a boost. Working in a bright environment would be challenging. Subjectively, the Inspiron 14 2-in-1 appears best with the display set at 85% to 100% brightness, in a modestly lit kitchen nook. In the same room, the Inspiron 16 2-in-1 only needs the level set to 50% to 60% to achieve the same effect. In fact, adjusting a photo on each unit to the same size (compensating for the 16-inch display’s size advantage), a scene of trees on a sunny day appeared brighter and with richer colors on the 16-inch unit, probably because the Inspiron 16 is capable of displaying 96% of the sRGB gamut to the Inspiron 14’s 64%. The Latitude 7420 finished in about the same amount of time as the Elite Dragonfly Max, significantly ahead of the 10th Gen Core i5 Carbon. Graphics and Battery Testing: Running Time to Spare We strongly recommend springing for the upgraded 4-cell, 63-watt-hour battery in our review unit, since the base model comes with a 3-cell, 42-watt-hour battery that likely won't last as long. Buyers can choose between a 42 Wh or 63 Wh battery. Our model was equipped with the ExpressCharge battery with four cells and 63 Wh. Fast charging is detrimental to battery life, which is why it has to be selectively activated in the Dell Power Manager. After that, the battery charges to 80% in one hour. The Latitude lasted 14 hours at 100% in the Wi-Fi test with reduced brightness to 150 cd/m², which is a very good value. Only the Ryzen ThinkPad T14s can top this figure. There are hardly any tablets in this display size range anymore. For subnotebooks, on the other hand, it is the standard format.