Top 5 reasons to BUY or NOT to buy the Dell Latitude 14 7420

The premium business laptop niche is mostly made out of users with enormous demand who expect a secure, stable, and feature-packed device, that will never let them down. The Dell Latitude 14 7420 is here to answer the call, and we have to say it, it might be one of the best devices that the brand has ever made. It comes with plenty of power under the hood, thanks to the Tiger Lake CPUs from Intel, and an arsenal of features that will surprise even the most demanding consumers.

Today we are presenting you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the Dell Latitude 14 7420.

Dell Latitude 14 7420: Full Specs / In-depth Review


4 reasons to BUY the Dell Latitude 14 7420

1. Design and build quality

To give the user as many options as possible, Dell offers this device in two variations, when it comes to the build materials. The first outfit is made of aluminum and it weighs 1.31 kg while being only 18mm tall. Choose the other option and you get a carbon fiber exterior, with an interesting pattern on the lid. Since our review unit had the latter carbon fiber outfit, we will focus more on it. The device weighed around 100 grams less and was a millimeter thicker. Also, despite being made from carbon fiber, one of the most durable materials in the world, we noticed some flex in the base and the lid, but fortunately, we didn’t hear any popping noises, which would have been horrendous.

Furthermore, the lid opens with a single hand up to about 80° and after that, the base lifts up, indicating stiffer hinges. Doing so reveals a great keyboard and touchpad combo. The keyboard is quite comfortable to type on as it has moderate key travel and clicky, yet quiet feedback. The power button also doubles as a fingerprint reader. The touchpad is also on point, with its glass-like surface, which offered smooth gliding and accurate tracking.


2. Battery life

Continuing with the trend of multiple choices, Dell offers one for the battery as well. There is a 42Wh and a 63Wh unit, of which we had the latter. It performed pretty well in our battery life tests, lasting for 16 hours and 40 minutes of Web browsing, and 13 hours and 9 minutes of video playback. In case you don’t know, we do our battery tests with the Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with.


3. I/O and features

The laptop has its I/O placed across the right and left side, with no ports on the back. The right side houses a Thunderbolt 4 port, a ventilation grill, followed by a 3.5mm audio jack, and an optional SmartCard reader. Move over to the left side, and you find a wedge-shaped security slot, an HDMI 2.0 connector, one USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen.1) port, a second Thunderbolt 4 connector (either of which can be used for charging the laptop), a MicroSD card slot for the photographer in us, and an optional SIM card tray.

Being a premium business laptop, it has a whole armory of features. It is stacked with sensors, which are mostly packed on the top bezel. In the center, there is either an HD or a Full HD webcam with a privacy shutter. It is surrounded by IR and proximity sensors, the former of which are used for face recognition and the latter, for waking up the laptop when you get close to it. The combination of both puts privacy on a pedestal, which is pretty neat.


4. Display

Unsurprisingly, there are two choices for the display, with either a Full HD or a 4K IPS display, with both of them sharing a 14-inch diagonal. Our unit had the Full HD panel, and we were pretty happy with it, as it had excellent viewing angles, a pretty high maximum brightness of 435 nits, and a very good contrast ratio of 1800:1. Color coverage is among the best, with 90% of the sRGB gamut.

Color accuracy can also be really well if you decide to use our Design and gaming profile, which brings down the dE value down to 1.2 from 5.4, which puts it extremely close to the professional standard. Here are the results with both the factory settings (left) and with our Design and gaming profile (right).


Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for Dell Latitude 14 7420 configurations with 14.0″ Innolux CHF07-140HCG (CMN1416) (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS panel.

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

Health-Guard

Health-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

Get all 3 profiles with 33% discount


1 reason NOT to buy the Dell Latitude 14 7420

1. Upgradeability

Unfortunately, the upgradability suffers, due to the entirety of either 8, 16, or 32GB of RAM being soldered onto the motherboard. The RAM is LPDDR4x and works in dual-channel mode, so at least the speed is very good. The only upgradeable thing here is the storage, with there being a single M.2 PCIe x4 drive.

Here is our detailed teardown video, in case you’re wondering how the upgrade process happens.


All Dell Latitude 14 7420 configurations:

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