Dell Latitude E7240 review

With its tough 12.5in aluminium chassis and soft-touch rubberised interior, the Dell Latitude E7240 is a smart business Ultrabook. The Latitude E7250 is just 20mm thick and weighs 1.4kg, so it won’t take up much room in a bag or briefcase.

Even better, the E7250 has a wide variety of ports despite its slim chassis. There’s a docking port for connecting the E7240 to a workstation, as well as a Smart Card slot, an SD card reader, three USB3 ports, a headset jack and a button to turn Wi-Fi on and off. The E7240 also has an HDMI output and a Gigabit Ethernet port.

The E7240 is available in a variety of specifications, but our review sample’s 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U processor and 4GB of RAM made the laptop more than fast enough for everyday office tasks. Its overall score of 47 in our multimedia benchmarks is what we expect to see from the i5-4200U. Many professionals won’t need high-end graphics performance, so the i5-4200U’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4400 graphics processor will be perfectly adequate. You certainly won’t have to worry about playing video and running presentations.

The E7240’s 12.5in screen was less impressive, as our colour calibrator showed it was displaying just 59.3 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is around average for a laptop screen, but we thought colours looked more washed out than we’d expect because of the screen’s strong cyan, green and yellow coverage. Red, magenta and blue were all extremely short in our colour gamut, so our solid colour image tests lacked warmth and depth. Blacks were also very high at 0.65cd/m2 and they appeared as various shades of grey depending on the angle of the screen.

Our high contrast test images suffered from a lack of detail as well. With a contrast ratio of just 313:1, most of the darker areas of our photos simply appeared as areas of solid black, with almost no fine shadow detail to be seen. This won’t be a problem for business professionals mainly dealing in text and word documents, but it’s definitely not the best screen for working with or viewing photos and images.

Its 1,366×768 resolution doesn’t leave much room for viewing multiple windows at once, but our biggest concern was the screen’s surprisingly poor viewing angles. The screen’s matt finish does a good job of keeping reflections at bay, but we saw a big shift in contrast as soon as we tilted the screen back from our normal working position, which is a shame considering the screen has a generous 180 degrees of screen tilt at its disposal.