Thinkpads Forum

I'm a long time Thinkpad user and fan. I currently have a W500 with the WUXGA 1680 x 1050 screen. I bought the W500 before the FHD was available. I've never seen a LED display on a Thinkpad.

Lately I've been looking at MacBook Pro's and am always impressed by the vibrancy of it's display. I don't know if it's the glossy screen, colours, brightness or what, but the screen just looks better to me with text and photo's.

Notebooks are just a collection of parts.

Is it possible to get a thinkpad T or W with a screen like a MacBook Pro?

Can I retrofit my W500 with a better screen? I don't think so. It's 15.4" and the only LED option is 1280 x 800, so lower resolution.

Retrofitting with a glossy screen should be possible. Glossy screens have a tendency to look more "vibrant".

Meh...I'd never order another laptop with a glossy screen. Apple does have a HD anti reflective non glossy screen upgrade for their laptops, think it runs 150, that would be the one I would opt for.

In all honesty dont expect to find any of the ibm/lenovo panels to look as good as an apple panel. While not the best, they are definitely one of the better panels out there.

ctkelly wrote:In all honesty dont expect to find any of the ibm/lenovo panels to look as good as an apple panel.

Did you know about the Thinkpad X220 with IPS? Or you are implying you find Apple's laptop screens better than IPS?

Is the IPS standard on the x220 or is that an upgrade option? Haven't seen one yet so I cant comment on the quality. If they are using the Dream Color 2 IPS panel I'll blindly admit its superior to the apple or dell RGB LED panels.

ctkelly wrote:In all honesty dont expect to find any of the ibm/lenovo panels to look as good as an apple panel. While not the best, they are definitely one of the better panels out there.

Why not? Apple (for the most part) uses the same CMO/AUO panels as are available to other manufacturers.

Sure any manufacture can stuff whatever panel they want into a laptop....but it all comes down to price and profit.

Apple uses a high quality TN display in the form of the LTN154MT07 Samsung panel. They are a high class Tn panel as reviewed by anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4205/the- ... -bridge/10. The Dell XPS 16 with RGB LED also puts up good reviews.

It would be nice if lenovo went back to IPS panels in all of their laptops, but Im not too upset with what they have. In my instance, I'm using a T410 I purchased recently. Here was anandtechs review on that particular panel: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2976/leno ... business/6.

All in all, as long as its a good quality TN panel....I doubt most of us would whine about it not being an IPS. There are variations of quality in IPS panels also, just like anything else. I preferred the e-IPS panel that was in my Dell 22" ultrasharp over the 24" IPS panel in my dell 24" ultrasharp....the 22" was a couple years newer, so just shows you how technology can change.

But the original questinon...can he find a T or W series laptop with a screen as good as a macbook pro......I'll stick with my original statement of no.

ctkelly wrote:But the original questinon...can he find a T or W series laptop with a screen as good as a macbook pro......I'll stick with my original statement of no.

The WSXGA+ (1680x1050) 15.4" CCFL panels on Z61m/T60/T61/T500 were generally considered very good for TN. Probably on par with the Macbook Pro matte variant. The HD+ (1600x900) 15.6" screens on T510 are generally highly ranked as well.

Aren't the FHD 95% gamut ones supposed to be pretty good, albeit with slightly lower contrast compared to the HD+?

Well, you could pop the screen bezel off your W500 temporarily to replace the screen.

Get official demonstrations from Lenovo (http://www.lenovoservicetraining.com/).

The link on the bottom of this post has the choice of Matte or Glossy LED Apple IPS 15.4 screens at 1440x900 resolutions.

http://www.laptopscreen.com/English/mod ... Mid~2010)/

I'm pretty sure those aren't IPS panels. AFAIK, no manufacturer has even made panels in that aspect ratio, resolution, dimension that's IPS and LED.

As a side commentary, I've seen some MacBooks at school (i.e. sitting behind them in a dark lecture hall, where they usually have their brightness turned up to some eye-searing level), and their screens haven't impressed me in the least. They have saturation cranked unnaturally high and/or has some bizarrely small, yet unnaturally vivid color gamut.

Let me correct myself, those screens are not IPS screens as I've mistaken the Apple desktops for the notebooks!

Thanks for the correction Colonel O' Neil, but the screens are still LED 1440x900.

If you walk into Best Buy, Frys or Micro Center and compare the laptops there, the best screens usually belong to the Apple laptops and a few Sony Vaios. But keep in mind that these stores cater to the average computer user, who looks for the cheapest laptop that has the fastest CPU and who doesn't care at all about display quality. That gave rise to the myth that Apple laptops have the best screens in the industry. But Apples pale when compared with some of the high-end PC laptops (which are not sold by Best Buy etc.).

this is the first time there is a person whom said that they prefer e-IPS over H-IPS or S-IPS LCD (unless the 24 inch LCD you got was a S-PVA one).

lead_org wrote:this is the first time there is a person whom said that they prefer e-IPS over H-IPS or S-IPS LCD

I haven't seen the e-IPS monitor mentioned above, but can tell you that many of Dell's large (24" to 30") H-IPS and S-IPS monitors have color uniformity issues, and some people also don't like how grainy they appear. Both my 3008WFP (S-IPS) and U2711 (H-IPS) have these issues, and so I actually prefer my 2407WFP and 2408WFP (S-PVA).

The 24" Ultrasharp I have is a S-IPS and was one of the first 24" models not the wide color gamut model. My biggest gripe was it had a warm tinge to the colors....not annoyingly noticible, its just when I ran the 22" e-ips next to it for a dual monitor dispaly it was obvious that the 22" was more neutral or correct to me anyways. It was also brighter. Most obvious was when booting up and seeing the post screens....With the 24" it had the warm color tinge to the white text, on the 22" it was as white as could be for the text. Monkeying around with settings never did help much. Outside of that...no big problems. I sold the 22" along with my main computer to a coworker and the 24" is sitting on my desk to be used with a docking station.

More so....I really really like the price I got on the 22" e-ips panel over what I paid for the 24" S-IPS.

Honestly, I think that Lenovo is suffering in the screen department not only due to target market (which has been discussed to death) but also due to volume.

Apple has a very narrow product line. They offer very few configurations of a very small group of products, and the limited customization means that they can place high volume -- very high volume, in fact -- orders for the parts that can't be customized much (such as LCD panels.)

Lenovo, on the other hand, has a very wide product line with plenty of configuration options (compare their CTO features to Apple's options), plus they have tons of special bid clients who are offered even more custom options. As a result, the given volume for a customizable part is likely much lower, putting Lenovo more at the mercy of the suppliers than Apple. That, combined with the already-limited market for high-end displays (see above: their business customers don't really care) means that they probably would have a really tough time getting the volume necessary to make a non-TN T-series option a financially viable one.

It's also worth noting that OS X has pretty solid color calibration support, and that Apple has used some... "interesting" (for lack of a better word) calibration settings in the past to make their laptop screens seem "more vivid".

zzz wrote:I'm a long time Thinkpad user and fan. I currently have a W500 with the WUXGA 1680 x 1050 screen. I bought the W500 before the FHD was available. I've never seen a LED display on a Thinkpad.

Lately I've been looking at MacBook Pro's and am always impressed by the vibrancy of it's display. I don't know if it's the glossy screen, colours, brightness or what, but the screen just looks better to me with text and photo's.

Notebooks are just a collection of parts.

Is it possible to get a thinkpad T or W with a screen like a MacBook Pro?

Can I retrofit my W500 with a better screen? I don't think so. It's 15.4" and the only LED option is 1280 x 800, so lower resolution.

Yes you can. I retrofit a beautiful Samsung LTN154U-L02 WUXGA 15.4" display into my T500 - that's 1920x1200. The contrast and viewing angles were much better than the awful stock LCD too. IT was CCFL, but the image quality difference between LED and CCFL backlighting is negligible and is overhyped in my opinion - the quality of the LCD polarizers and panel is much more important.

Could you make some pictures Bibin?

I would love to see what result you have achieved.

Bibin wrote:IT was CCFL, but the image quality difference between LED and CCFL backlighting is negligible and is overhyped in my opinion - the quality of the LCD polarizers and panel is much more important.

The main advantages of LED backlighting are power efficiency (marginal, depending on the unit) and longevity (substantial, as they don't dim and rarely burn out.)

LED backlighting is also less fragile; the cold-cathode tube is thin and prone to snapping (mercury vapor is not fun) which is why CCFL backlit ThinkPads needed that top rollcage, which isn't so necessary with LED.

Colonel O'Neill wrote:LED backlighting is also less fragile; the cold-cathode tube is thin and prone to snapping (mercury vapor is not fun) which is why CCFL backlit ThinkPads needed that top rollcage, which isn't so necessary with LED.

This is also true. My T410 has a rather flexible screen lid, but I'll be darned if it hasn't held up to *far* more abuse than I would have guessed it could. I chalk this up to the LED backlight and some good design.

This is true. I was more addressing image quality, but for durability and longevity LED lighting surely does win.

Most of the time, LED backlighting tends to provide light on the cooler side of the spectrum, whereas CCFL backlighting would provide warmer light. There are wider-gamut CCFLs that have additional chemicals in the tube to provide more frequencies, and LED's take the route of providing seperate red, green, and blue LEDs in the backlight (RGBLED).