Photo by Fabian Albert on Unsplash

When I built my PC a couple of years ago, I wanted to grab some great 4K monitors to go along with it. At the time, the Dell P2715Q monitor was the recommended one on Wirecutter, so I grabbed two of those. They worked great with my PC, which is hooked up with DisplayPort cables. When I recently plugged my Sony PlayStation 4 Pro into it, I couldn‘t get it to display at a 4K resolution.

It turns out that from the factory, Dell does not enable HDMI 2.0, the spec that allows 4K video transfer. And only monitors manufactured after Feb. 2016 even have the capability. After some online sleuthing, I was able to find out how to manually enable it, not in the menus but with a specific button combination (not this again).

You can find a slightly more detailed guide on this Dell support page (now only available on archive.org), but the gist is this:

  • Unplug all video cables
  • Switch to the HDMI input source
  • Press and hold the green checkmark button for 6-8 seconds
  • Disable HDMI 1.4 (which in turn enables HDMI 2.0)

I know it’s an older monitor, but hopefully, that helps if you happen to come across one. It would have been nice if they started enabling it by default.