Thinkpads Forum

The 1920x1200 screen is why I got this used W500. But the brightness and contrast were equally bad among the the W500s I had to pick from. Looking online, the dim screen is a known deficiency of the design. This is sad since Photoshop editing is my intended task on this machine.

What hacks exist to bright the screen up? Is a mirror-like material already in place behind the screen? Has anybody tried adding auxiliary lighting back there to created a brighter "lowest brightness"? Seems like there would be a lot of different ways to brighten things up, but a friend warned me that the lighting and screens used in the W500 is a royal PITA.

You probably got a Samsung screen, they're dark and aged by now...

There was a discussion about a led kit for these kind of screens in the German sister forum, but IIRC it wasn't working properly.

Easiest thing would be to replace the panel with a NOS (new old stock) lcd from one of the following brands:

LG Philips LP154WU1-TLB1
Sharp LQ154M1LW02
Sharp LQ154M1LW2A

The Sharps were not offered by Lenovo, they're used in several Dells and it's fully compatible. Although you need to remove some metal brackets in order to make it fit in the W500. LQ154M1LW2A should be a straight swap.

I can recommend the Sharp. I had two of those. They were both new and had a peak brightness of 250 nits, thus were even able to keep up with the 300 nit LED IPS of the T540p:

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img542/6589/3yol.jpg