50% really? That seems crazy!! My uses are probably mostly content consumption and lighter work as I have a PC for heavier loads. As for scaling issues, have you experienced that? Is it bad? I have an X1 carbon that is 1440p and a 1440p monitor and as long as I set the window scaling to 125%, everything looks good...

Beyond the hit to battery runtime (think 50% of what you get with FHD on an UHD screen), it depends on what you plan to do with the system.

If you mostly watch videos/movies:  UHD may be the better choice.

If you mostly do work, run applications:  be absolutely sure what you run is designed for UHD, or you'll run into display scaling issues.  Not all applications play well with UHD.

@abhakoo At least in the US as of this writing, there are 3 display options for the XPS 13 9300:

• FHD+ non-touch, anti-glare.  This would be matte.
• FHD+ touch, anti-reflective. This would be glossy.
• UHD+ touch, anti-reflective. This would be glossy.

Thank you so much. I think I'm going to go with the FHD, i7, 16GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD. I don't think a crisper display is worth significantly worse battery life, scaling issues, and the $300 price tag.

Just wondering, do you know if the FDH+ touch screen is matte or glossy? I would prefer matte but glossy wouldn't be a massive con.

Thanks!

A little bit of a late reply, but I don't see this advice offered anywhere so wanted to add it here.

You can always lower the resolution of your UHD display to 1200p (scaling at 150%) and disable HDR (in fact Windows does this automatically when in battery mode by default) in which case you'll get the similar battery life to what you'd get with the FHD model. When you plug in, or when battery life doesn't matter (like maybe watching a movie in bed_ you can enjoy all the benefits of HDR and 4k).

50% reduction in battery life is an exaggeration.

Hmm. Interesting. It would be great if I could do that. Though I've heard that even if you lower the resolution, battery life still takes a hit because you still have to power the rest of the pixels.Honestly, I've heard it both ways, so I don't really know what the right answer is.

I think that disabling HDR is great advice, and I normally have my charger with me, but I would like enough battery life to get me through a long day.

I'm still debating the choice myself. Do you have any experience with lowering the resolution and disabling HDR?

Thanks.

I dont have the 13" but I have 9500 (the 15" one).  I have the UHD+ on it.  Well I don't know about you, but for me the UHD at 100% is already too sharp / small.  I still like the higher density display because I can fit more things on the screen while still making it readable with the scaling; I find 175% comfortable for my eyes.  I imagine on a 13" I may be doing 200% or even more.  For apps that works well with UHD, the images and texts look really crisp and clean.  It is quite beautiful.

However as others have mentioned, some apps don't work with scaling.  Such as my old copy of Photoshop and Illustrator CS6.  They ignore the scaling setting completely and render at 1:1 at 4K, they are sooo tiny.  There are ways to "fix" this using manifest files and thats how I made it work, not sure if it will work in other instances.

About getting an UHD and lowering the resolution the FHD, even though it make sense that FHD is exactly a quarter of UHD, for some reason there are some video processing that made the scaled down UHD into FHD not look as sharp as an actual FHD screen.  Well that is in my case anyways.  On a super sharp 13" UHD anything might look sharp anyways. 

@viswhiz  The reason using FHD resolution on a UHD display doesn't look perfect even though each pixel from an FHD image maps perfectly onto a 2x2 UHD pixel grid is because some scenarios involve subpixel rendering, such as text sharpening.  I'm not sure what accounts for the video scenario you describe though, but when it comes to scaling video up and down, there are a lot of different algorithms for video decoding and scaling, so there may not be one answer.

@Wooloomooloo  Running a UHD display at FHD and disabling HDR does not give you the battery life equivalent of an FHD display.  Disabling HDR certainly will help, but that has nothing to do with FHD vs. UHD directly.  There are FHD panels that support HDR, after all, even if Dell isn't offering them on this particular system.  But in terms of resolution, Windows 10 these days actually draws a distinction between "desktop resolution" and "active signal resolution".  In those cases, even if you set Windows to render at a lower resolution (by changing the desktop resolution), it will still use the native resolution of the target display for the signal on the wire (active signal resolution).  The GPU in that case will take the rendered FHD content and scale it up to UHD post-render before sending a UHD signal out to the display.  There are various reasons this design is implemented, but even if that weren't the case and the display was actually receiving an FHD signal from the GPU, it will be scaling that FHD signal up to map it onto all of its UHD pixels.  You might save a little bit of battery life in the form of reduced GPU load if it's only rendering content at FHD rather than UHD, but the scale of that benefit would depend on what you were doing.  The savings are unlikely to be meaningful when using everyday productivity applications, for example, since typical everyday productivity applications don't require much rendering effort the way that decoding video would, for example.

Hmm. Ok. Thank you so much!! I have a much better idea of the nuances between the two screens options. I think I’m leaning toward FHD because I don’t think that the onslaught of possible issues and high price of the 4K display is worth it. I would love the extra pixels, especially for content consumption and even just daily tasks, but I just don’t know how much I’m willing to compromise for that.

Now I have MUCH more clarity in the facts, but it will probably come down to an opinionated decision.

Thank you all so much!! 

@abhakoo  If you want more clarity around the battery life impact, see if you can find reviews of an FHD and UHD XPS 13 9300 conducted by the same outlet and therefore using the same test methodology.  Notebookcheck is known for extremely in-depth reviews of laptops, and they often test multiple different configurations of the same system model specifically to provide these types of insights.  And as it happens, they've done that for this system.  Here is their review of an XPS 13 9300 with the FHD display (non-touch, matte), and here is their review of an XPS 13 9300 with the UHD display.  That isn't the ONLY difference between those two systems, but it might be the closest you'll get.  (Although confusingly, the raw results they post don't align with the time difference they mention in the review of the UHD version as compared to the FHD version they reviewed first.)  And you might find the in-depth review of the systems useful for other purposes anyway.

Yes, that's exactly what I do. Before doing so, my battery would typically say 4:30 remaining after a full charge, but after doing both it now says 7:00 - 7:25 or so with the display at about 50% brightness.

You're right that more pixels does mean more power consumption, simply because the number of updates the screen requires, but the vast majority of energy on an LCD is the backlight, which is the same regardless of resolution. Disabling HDR reply much halves the energy needed for the backlight (which is 75% of all the power consumed for the display) and lowering the resolution reduces the work of the GPU.

The comment above that this won't net equivalent battery life as the FHD screen is correct, but also it's nowhere near a 50% reduction.

Regardless, the FHD is a better choice for many people given it costs less (meaning you can spend the savings on better specs) - so it's up to you. I like touch/pen support, I do like the additional contrast ratio and HDR when watching movies and super-long battery life isn't my main concern.