The future of high-quality screens is... bleak?

[plympton]

A discussion or a question, not sure.

My wife's old laptop is dying - time to shop for a replacement. Trouble is, it looks like NOTHING out there has a decent screen anymore. Couple that with the march towards ubiquitous 16x9, and the future for high-quality USABLE laptop displays looks bleak. Or only viable at +/- 5 degrees in angle.

Let's get this out of the way - I'm an IPS bigot. If it doesn't have IPS, I'm bummed. I shoe-horned an IPS display into my X32, and I love it. Once you go IPS, you can't go back, to steal a phrase.

But I look around, and almost EVERY review of a reasonably priced laptop complains of viewing angles - sometimes they even go so far as to say, "Well, it wasn't THAT bad if you tilt your head just right...". Ugh. ThinkPads, in particular, seem to have gone downhill (always were downhill?) in particular - the WSXGA+ 15.4 screen on my T60 is criminally dim and hard to see at any angle.

It appears that you can get SOME laptops with a wide viewing angle screen (HP's 15.6 EliteBooks APPEAR to have that option - and they're 16x9), but I'm skeptical - HP lists their tablets as having UWVA screens (presumably IPS), so I'm not sure what WVA means - PVA? Improved TN? The iPad is using a 9.7" 4x3 IPS display - will the move to 16x9 CREATE a niche market of 4x3 Luddites? Tablets, of course, have IPS displays - mostly? - but despite being the year of the tablet, I'm not quite there yet.

So, my dilemma is - do I get something right this second - or do I wait 6 months or a year for the market to say, "I'm made as hell and am not going to take <these crappy screens> anymore!!" ?

I know we can't see the future, but what does the collective wisdom here think?

-Dan

[spuddog]

As Slick Willy would say "I feel your pain". Seriously, the movement in laptops is away from high quality to low price. I really don't understand the net book thing, we had those laptops 5 years ago.

Scott