Thinkpads Forum

This model has a 14" screen and will be used by a teen mostly for gaming and once in a while for typing school assignments. Any thoughts on which display is better?

Searching, I see pros and cons for both. Thinking since mostly doing gaming, go with higher res.

In my opinion, stay away from the lower resolution screen unless the user has bad vision. Even then, you could choose the better screen and change the DPI setting in Windows to 125% to make reading things easier.

The only benefit I can think of for lower resolution is that the GPU doesn't have as much work to do while gaming, so frame rates would be better when really pushing things.
I personally would be annoyed with 1366x768.

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Personally, I can't tell the difference between HD and HD+.

I would prefer HD+, because I do need as much space as I can get on the screen, both horizontally and vertically.

But in your situation, I actually think HD may be a better choice, since it will only occasionally be used for work. And for gaming, on a 14" screen - HD vs HD+ is not that big of a diff in quality, but may be a big diff in frame rates, so on the HD+ screen, the user may end up bumping the resolution down, and then what's the point?

SteveDC wrote:Thinking since mostly doing gaming, go with higher res.

Your main concern should be whether this teen's school assignments (and anything else involving text) would benefit from 1600x900. 1600x900 has 37.3 % more pixels than 1366x768, meaning you can viewing 37.3% more text on the screen. If this person likes to view two windows side by side (e.g. reading a PDF document on the left, while typing a report about it on the right), or prefers to scroll less, then 1600x900 is the one to get, because it would enable him/her to work more efficiently.

There is another potential advantage of going for the 1600x900. Manufacturers tend to, though not always, use the lowest-quality (i.e. cheapest) panels for 1366x768, but use somewhat higher-quality ones for higher resolutions. "Quality" refers to color quality, viewing angles, and contrast. The rationale behind this is that they assume people opting for 1366x768 to be cheapskates who don't care about quality.

Images (e.g. gaming) do benefit from higher res, but the improvement is marginal.