What to Look for in a Good Laptop Display
The display in a laptop is among the most vital hardware elements for your system. Ultimately, the screen is the medium through which you use your laptop. Most people are not aware of how to screen measurements work and how these parameters influence the display. These parameters include resolution, contrast, color gamut, black level, and uniformity.
It is worth noting that when you’re shopping for a new laptop, the display is among the few crucial things you have to choose carefully. A beautiful display is something every user will appreciate, even those who aren’t necessarily tech-savvy. Since you will be staring at the screen all day, it makes sense to go for a laptop whose display you can appreciate.
Brightness is another element that the best laptop displays try to capitalize. They also have excellent color reproduction, which separates dull screens from vibrant and captivating screens. The sRGB color gamut comes in handy to measure this parameter, with the minimum acceptable sRGB level being 100%
Screen Resolution: 1080p or Higher
Each display panel consists of pixels, which are essentially a series of dots. The more concentration of these dots, the better the level of detail that can be captured on a screen. Most of the laptops often come with 1366 x 768 screen resolutions that fail to incorporate the amount of detail that high definition screens do. The latter has a pixel resolution of at least 1920 x 1080, also known as the 1080p resolution.
To better visualize how big a difference this is, a full HD or 1080p screen can accommodate two full-sized windows together, which is impossible on a 1366 x 768 panel. Other screens have even higher resolutions such as the 1440p or the 2160p, otherwise known as the 2K and 4K resolutions, respectively. Images and videos tend to look even sharper at the higher resolutions giving you the ability to see even the finest details.
However, this comes at a cos with such screens consuming more power drawn from the laptop battery. It means that such laptops often suffer from lower battery life than the lower resolutions, but that is a reasonable price to pay considering what you get.
Touch or Non-Touch displays
This property applies to the 2-in-1 laptops that require that you have full touch screen capability. However, if you are considering going this way, there are a few key considerations to be made for the touch devices. There are numerous advantages of using touch screens, including convenience, but some disadvantages include:
Power Consumption: Touch screens use up more of your battery compared to standard non-touch screens.
Glossy Screens: Most of the touch devices come in glossy screen surfaces that tend to reflect a lot of light, which ultimately messes up tour viewing angles.
Price: For different configurations of similar devices, those with touch capabilities tend to go for more money than their non-touch counterparts.
Screen Brightness: 250 nits and above
Brighter screens offer a much better experience when coupled with high resolution and color accuracy properties. Brightness is essentially what makes colors appear more conspicuous and also allows for wider viewing angles.
Working outdoors or near high amounts of natural light requires that you use a laptop with high brightness to see better under direct sunlight. Brightness in laptops is measured in nits, where the higher the nits, the more bright the screen is. A rule of thumb for a good laptop display requires a brightness of about 250 to 300 nits.
Color Reproduction Quality: IPS, OLED, AMOLED, and Wide Gamut
A top panel should be able to have a much higher color output, which in turn makes these colors appear more vibrant. This quality is measured through sRGB gamut with the best of the bunch having a 95% and above sRGB. A wider gamut like Adobe RGB or NTSC is often what manufacturers use to specify their screens.
Good quality laptop displays use IPS (In-Plane Switching) panels that give much better viewing angles. The best screens that reproduce excellent colors are OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) and AMOLED (Active Matrix OLED) panels. These screens produce more authentic colors, with black being completely black.