Thinkpads Forum

Just got a T410 and the display is quite an improvement over my T500 or my wife's T400; I assume the back light is LED or? Wondering if I upgraded my X200 to some other X2?? would I "see" a similar improvement?

You can put in a LED-backlit WXGA+ (1440×900) screen from an X200s or X201s.

Backlight type (LED versus CCFL) has almost no impact on visual improvement, it is marketing fluff only. The important parameters are the display technology and real contrast ratio. All TN displays are horrible ugly crap. The only improvement you can get now is X220/X230 IPS display (real contrast over 800:1) but it has low resolution 1366x768 only. Everything else is horrible TN crap with zero viewing angle and extremely poor real contrast ratio below 150:1 (no black color, shining gray only), including the X200s/X201s 1440x900 display.

Reasonable contrast ratio of a display is at least 500:1.

X200s 1280x800 TN 147:1 http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Len ... 531.0.html
X201 1280x800 TN 126:1 http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Len ... 743.0.html
X201s 1440x900 TN 116:1 http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Len ... 451.0.html
X220 1366x768 IPS 842:1 http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Len ... 639.0.html
X230 1366x768 IPS 1037:1 http://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-Thi ... 317.0.html

Puppy wrote:Backlight type (LED versus CCFL) has almost no impact on visual improvement...All TN displays are horrible ugly crap.

I agree with the first part. The advantages of LED are that it consumes less power and is brighter, but has almost no impact on image quality. But I disagree with the latter part, because I find the best TN displays to be actually quite good.

pianowizard wrote:But I disagree with the latter part, because I find the best TN displays to be actually quite good.

Some of hi-res 15.6" FHD TN displays used in T and W series and so-so acceptable, contrast ratio over 500:1, still zero viewing angle, but it is not case of TN panels used in X series (nor the 15" WUXGA+ Samsung TN panels in W500 series with horrible FRC).

Puppy wrote:Some of hi-res 15.6" FHD TN displays used in T and W series and so-so acceptable, contrast ratio over 500:1, still zero viewing angle, but it is not case of TN panels used in X series (nor the 15" WUXGA+ Samsung TN panels in W500 series with horrible FRC).

I wasn't talking about specific TN panels, just TN in general. My HDTV is TN and while the viewing angle from below the screen is quite poor (perhaps only 10 degrees), the left, right and top viewing angles are incredibly wide and at first they made me suspect this was IPS.

pianowizard wrote:I wasn't talking about specific TN panels, just TN in general.

My primary concern about TN panels is that today it does not have any sense to use nor promote them. It is like trying to improve steam engine over and over to compete combustion engine. The price of e-IPS or c-PVA panels is almost the same having 1000 times better quality than TN panel.

As for LED backlight used in notebook displays, they have serious issues with backlight uniformity (typical for X220/X230 at maximum brightness) and low brightness controlled by pulse modulation (low frequency which is disturbing for some people). Again, wide gamut CCFL backlight is still used in high-end desktop monitors and there are reasons for that. The less power is the only valid argument but I'm not sure it can balance all these disadvantages. And yes, I'm biased against LED backlight until there will be high-end NEC/Eizo monitors in 1000 to 2000 USD price range using it. There was Samsung XL20 in the past but failed miserably.

Wow, got a whole lot of technical info. As the fifth grade girl giving a book report said: "this book told me more about penguins than I needed to know."
Will I get a better display [or as good a display as my T410] if I buy a different X2XX?

Posted by RealBlackStuff:
You can put in a LED-backlit WXGA+ (1440×900) screen from an X200s or X201s.

Got a favored screen make/number for that application?