The OLED Laptop Has Arrived: Time To Make The Switch?
Dell XPS 15 9510 with OLED display.
Credit: Dell
OLED laptops are now widely available. Time to move on from LCD?
HP, Dell, Lenovo, Razer, Samsung, and Asus all offer OLED display-equipped laptops now, with the big three [HP, Dell, Lenovo] offering several models as of summer 2021.
Thats a big change from two years ago when OLED laptops were rare as hens teeth.
This year, Dell, for example, recently started offering its popular XPS 13 with an OLED option for the first time. That follows the first XPS 15 OLED back in 2019.
And HP is offering OLED displays on its Spectre and Envy lines. Ditto on Lenovos ThinkPad line.
OLED is a different animal: Dont think organic-light-emitting diode [OLED] displays are better than LCDs? Think again.
The updated Dell XPS 13 931o with an OLED display produces a wider color gamut, sharper contrast, a massive contrast ratio, and highly-saturated, vivid colors. Along with the HP Spectre x360 14s OLED, its the best display on a 13-inch class laptop Ive used to date.
On OLEDs, blacks are really black. And OLEDs can turn off black pixels in dark mode [LCDs cant do this], potentially extending battery life.
The goodness of an OLED is more apparent on a bigger, laptop-sized display than a smaller smartphone screen. I see a stark difference in day to day use: colors on the Dell XPS 13 9310 OLED are bolder, brighter, with better contrast than the other LCD laptops I test.
- OLEDs deliver more vibrant colors, deeper blacks, wide color gamuts, better contrast, and high contrast ratios.
- OLEDs can take advantage of dark mode by turning off pixels and thereby saving battery life.
- Because of the ability to turn individual pixels on or off, OLEDs make possible always-on displays on the Apple Watch 6 and Samsung Galaxy phones. [e.g., OLED screens in standby mode can turn on just a few pixels to light up small parts of the screen].
What took so long? OLEDs have been slow to arrive on laptops despite being used for a decade on Samsung Galaxy phones and since 2017 on the iPhone. Supply has been the bottleneck. Samsung didnt start to ship 13-inch OLED displays to customers like HP in anything approaching significant commercial volumes until 2019.
Battery life: based on my testing, its manufacturer and model dependent. The newer 3.5K OLEDs deliver better battery life than the older 4K OLEDs. That said, in most cases you will get longer battery life on a laptop with a low-resolution FHD [1,920-by-1,080] LCD.
Price: An OLED will cost you extra. But this year with 3.5K OLEDs, the cost gap is much smaller than before. On the new Dell XPS 13 9310, the OLED only adds about $50 over the 4K LCD. And on the new Dell XPS 15 9510, there is no cost difference between 3.5K OLED and 4K LCD display options.
That said, in some cases, the extra cost for older 4K OLEDs can be as much as $200.
Comments or suggestions can be sent to me via a direct twitter message at twitter.com/mbrookec.
I was a founding member of CNET news and hardware editor at CNET, a contributing technology reporter for the New York Times, and a reporter and editor at the Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly -- the latter in Japan, where I lived for ten years.
Read MoreRead Less