Summary
- OLED displays offer improved contrast over LCDs, which can have a tangible impact in movies, games, and other content that fully exploits HDR.
- In most cases, though, the gap with LCDs isn’t that dramatic, since computers already do a lot to optimize output, and you’re sitting just a few feet away.
- OLED often comes with a price premium, and it may actually drain your laptop’s battery faster if you’re taking advantage of HDR.
A few weeks ago, my previous laptop — a Razer Blade 17 — died hard. There had been signs of the upcoming demise, such as its USB ports randomly blinking out, and graphics performance dropping through the basement. But one day it simply refused to boot past the BIOS — despite even the valiant efforts of my wife, who’s a veteran in tech support. Then it refused to power on at all, so there was pretty much no choice but to buy a new computer. It wasn’t worth the expense to maybe, possibly repair a three-year-old machine for work the next day.
By coincidence, a local shop happened to be running a sale on a Lenovo Pro 5i with almost the exact specs I was hunting for. One of the only outliers was its display tech: OLED. Given that the premium OLED usually commands were wiped out by the discount, I was all in. But as I soon discovered, I probably would’ve been just as well off if it had an LCD slightly better than the one on my Razer. I wouldn’t recommend that most people spend extra on an OLED laptop, or at least, not much.
Why is OLED such a big deal on a PC?
The hype that pulls you in
All modern LCDs rely on LED backlights. There may be just a few of them, or a few thousand in the case of mini-LED screens, but they’re there. An advantage of this is that the best LCDs are legible in just about any lighting condition without much impact to their cost.
There’s a big downside to backlighting, however, and that’s contrast. While LCDs can dim one or more backlights to improve contrast levels, they can never shut them off completely. That’s why you’ll sometimes see a faint gray in parts of an image that are intended to be mostly or entirely black, especially if your display’s overall brightness setting is too high. When a bright object is surrounded by darkness (such as a full moon), it can even produce a halo effect, with light from the object “bleeding” elsewhere. This was a recurring issue with the mini-LED panels Apple briefly used for the iPad Pro.
OLED images “pop” in a way that mini-LED displays can only approximate, and that only ultra-expensive micro-LEDs can directly imitate.
OLED panels ditch backlights completely, instead illuminating on a pixel-by-pixel basis. The biggest benefit of this — apart from allowing for super-thin screens — is the ability to shut off pixels at will, resulting in true blacks and sharply defined edges. OLED images “pop” in a way that mini-LED displays can only approximate, and that only ultra-expensive micro-LEDs can directly imitate. This makes them ideal for HDR (high dynamic range) effects, particularly since they tend to offer a wider color gamut. You often need QLED technology to match OLED’s color range.
Another consequence is better energy efficiency in some scenarios, since black pixels don’t consume any power. To exploit this, many people switch to dark wallpaper, and leave their computer’s Dark Mode on 24/7. If nothing else, darker pixels draw less energy than bright ones.
Why OLED isn’t as earthshaking as you might think
The desktop isn’t your living room
Under the right circumstances, my laptop’s OLED display can be mighty impressive. The best example might be Cyberpunk 2077, which often contrasts colorful neon lights against dark shadows and a grimy cityscape. OLED amplifies this contrast dramatically, making full use of the game’s HDR support. In fact, the game goes a bit overboard at times — recently, when driving out of a dark Night City tunnel into the midday sun, the contrast was so strong that I literally couldn’t see where I was going. I even had to squint a bit to avoid searing my eyes.
Most of the apps I run aren’t Cyberpunk, however. When I’m staring at Google Chrome, I don’t notice much difference at all versus my old Razer laptop, at least outside of videos with HDR support. There might be subtle improvements, but they’re difficult to spot. On a day-to-day basis, there’s probably more impact from the fact that the new display uses a glossy finish rather than a matte one. Matte screens are better at killing reflections, but tend to look less vibrant.
This decreased impact stems not just from less dramatic lighting, but from the fact that computers are already pretty adept at adjusting graphics on the fly, using techniques like automatic gamma correction. You’re also sitting just two or three feet away from them, making it relatively easy for you to detect image nuances regardless of the technology involved. OLED allows for more nuance, naturally — but if you’re staring at well-lit terrain in a game like PUBG, it’s not going to make you a better sniper. You might, at best, be a fraction of a second quicker at spotting someone crouched in a shadow.
In some cases, OLED is likely to reduce battery life, not extend it.
As for battery life, that’s something I have yet to really test, but I doubt that OLED stretches it much on a gaming system like the Pro 5i. Based on anecdotes and Lenovo’s official specs, I might be able to reach upwards of 6 hours if I limited myself to lightweight productivity apps, and took advantage of every conservation option possible, such as dropping brightness as far as I could tolerate. The problem is that the biggest power drain by far is the dedicated GPU, which kicks into gear for tasks like 3D gaming. Playing something like Cyberpunk, I’d doubt I’d get more than three hours. Even if OLED provided a 25% boost (which it probably doesn’t), that would still be a pathetic 45 minutes extra.
In some cases, OLED is likely to reduce battery life, not extend it. Part of the point of HDR is increasing the intensity of highlights while retaining detail — so if a game or movie has a lot of bright imagery without enough darkness to counteract it, you could find yourself racing for an AC outlet a lot faster than you were planning. Don’t expect to spend an evening binging Good Omens or Mafia: The Old Country out on a patio.
Am I still happy to have OLED? Yes. But that’s because I didn’t pay upwards of $100 to $200 or more for the privilege. If I were buying a laptop today, I’d gladly choose an LCD model to save money, all other specs being equal.
