What's the Best Gaming Laptop Display? Mini-LED vs OLED vs IPS

all right so today we're going to talk about some of the best gaming laptop displays you can buy on the market from some of the best gaming laptops that you can buy on the market so the laptops we're going to be comparing here today are starting with the Asus zephrus G14 so this is the world's first 14-in mini LED gaming laptop display so this is a QHD display on the G14 with a 16 X10 aspect ratio for 1600p it's got a high refresh rate of 165 HZ um High color gamut of 100% DCI P3 54 dimming zones and you have a multizone dimming switch so you can actually switch the dimming zones off um that's sort of a special feature that Asus laptops only have that allows you to basically get rid of any of the blooming that you might experience when you're doing daily tasks like browsing or checking emails stuff like that whereas in content you turn your multis Zone dimming on now you're getting that excellent contrast and brightness that mini LED is known for this one tops out over 600 nits of brightness which is still very bright next here we have an OLED display this is the Asus Zenbook Pro 16x OLED this laptop is kind of a unicorn it's really hard to find for some reason but I was able to get one it also has a very unique display this one has a 3.2k display so it's not quite 4K it's not quite QHD um it's somewhere in the middle there 120 HZ 16 X10 aspect ratio and it's a touchcreen with 550 nits Peak brightness I'm not really aware of this display being anywhere else on the market either so that's really cool to see couple differences between a mini LED and OLED at least with what we're seeing in laptops is that you know mini LED of course gets much brighter while OLED has perfect blacks every time with no blooming so both have their trade-offs you know OLED can have Burnin a lot of the times it doesn't have uh free sync or g-sync for some reason on laptops that usually also means no Advanced Optimus either which is a pretty big convenience and that sucks to miss out on it can feel pretty dim especially when it's a full screen bright picture because there's usually like a auto brightness limiter in OLED panels and they're usually on glossy screen um I know for some people that's an issue so that's another thing with OLED and if it's a touchscreen OLED like the one here on the Zenbook Pro 16x it has like this weird screen door effect on like bright white backgrounds it's really hard to describe but it's like you can barely like faintly see this weird like digital kind of like looking through like a see-through like um screened in patio but I noticed a lot of laptops are moving to OLED at least gaming laptops in 2024 looks like some of the zephrus models from Asus and the blades 16 are going that route and I kind of wonder if they just did that because it was new and shiny because there's nothing else new really coming out for 20124 no new gpus and the CPUs aren't really too big of a deal especially on the AMD side so maybe they just needed at least one feature that was different that they could hype up and that's why they're moving from mini LED to OLED but honestly who knows you'll see here each one has their tradeoffs me personally I prefer mini LED but as we're looking at these you'll kind of see why hopefully even or maybe not either way I think both are fantastic also it seems like some of the OLED panels for these 2024 laptops actually do finally have free sync and g-sync so that's at least good to see but yeah anyways speaking of mini LED the next laptop we have is the Razer Blade 16 um that one is a high color gamut mini LED display with over 1,000 nits of brightness and this razor here has a 4K display so 16 X10 aspect ratio and excellent contrast but it has no multizone dimming switch so you're kind of stuck with blooming in regular task although a lot of that also just comes down to the dimming algorithm itself and we're going to take a look at that and then lastly we have the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i this one features a 240 HZ IPS display so it's the only one here that's a regular IPS and you might notice that when we go over these displays but the contrast is going to be a little bit lower and it also has 100% srgb but it does not have a higher color gamut so it doesn't really go far into the dcip 3 zones and that's going to definitely hurt it a bit in HDR but we'll take take a look and see how much of a difference that really makes so all these laptops either have a 4080 or 4090 and a pretty high-end CPU in them as well so these are all expensive kind of class leading gaming laptops some people out there really don't care about display quality they just want the best performance possible While others like to have a more balanced experience between display fan noise typing experience things like that so today we're just going to focus on displays so let's Jump Right In I'm going to bounce back and forth between footage caught on my professional camera and footage caught on my phone because it's really hard for a camera to really pick up what the human eye would see especially in dark environments like this with a bright screen flashing at you so that's why I'm going to be kind of bouncing back and forth between the two because it really will help highlight certain aspects that one camera does not capture over the other so first we're just starting with some HDR scenes one thing you'll notice right off the bat is how bright that razor display is just look at the reflection off of the keyboard how yellow and vibrant that that is compared to the Lenovo Legion on the left it looks very dim in comparison to all of them and then also notice how the OLED over here on the right um the colors the yellow actually looks a little bit different it looks more orange almost and it's hard to say why that would be it could just be the camera or just a difference in panels color calibration things like that and also now check out this ow clip so again that blade 16 the owl is just popping off the screen almost so this camera angle really is highlighting brightness over everything else and that's where you're seeing the brightness of all these panels come into play another good scene here is this gecko you can really see the brightness difference between the G14 and the legion here the G14 is definitely brighter than both the legion and the OLED screens also the OLED screen is looking a little less vibrant as far as colors in this one as well same here with the bird obviously the blade 16 is the brightest but the G14 isn't too far behind in brightness and then the OLED and then the legion okay and now when I turn the iso up on my camera we are going to lose some of the brighter details but we're going to see a lot more of contrast so how dark these screens can get and as you know OLED always shows a perfect black screen mini LED can dim things to pretty much completely dark you know the usual problem with this is some occasional blooming around bright objects and we're going to check for that here compared to OLED and then IPS displays since they're EDG lit are never going to hit that same level of contrast and we're going to see that here as well so the camera settings like this pay attention more to the black levels than the actual picture on the screen cuz it's just going to be a little overblown on the camera so starting with the chameleon clip here U you can see that the legion you know it now stands out like a sore thumb you know you can tell it's not as bright either because the chameleon should be losing a lot of the color here um instead you know it's this is more like how that contrast actually looks in person compared to the others um it's never like a fully black screen there's always like a a light present um which I will admit once you've used Min LED and OLED it is really hard to go back to IPS for this reason alone when you're playing games or watching movies that have dark scenes in them and you see that kind of just bright back lit grayish background it's it's so hard to go back to that when you're used to like a higher contrast ratio so here again with this bird the edges of around the bird are pretty much black on the OLED pretty dark on the mini LEDs maybe not perfectly black and then just kind of gray on the legion same with the fruit on the screen here um it looks pretty much black around all of the OLED and mini LEDs and then just kind of gray around the legions IPS display here's another one where you can pretty much see the oled's black levels a little better than the mini LED um the vegetables on the table and then one of the standout Clips here is like the spool of fabric so you can see the legion just this is where it really sticks out like a soreth the most of any of the scenes same with the potato or whatever this thing is here like it is clearly obvious how the contrast is so much better on mini LED and OLED again with the sparklers Clips like these really do highlight where this newer panel technology comes into play or scenes like this with sparklers Stars black background BR smoke things like that so you tell a huge difference there just to highlight this a little better I turn the lights on in the room again this will sort of highlight the contrast giving you a more realistic approach when it's not a completely dark room some people think that you can only see the benefits of OLED or mini LED in a dark room but I would have to disagree cuz look even you know when there is some light in the room you can still clearly tell which displays have more contrast here and when it shows like the bottles on the screen here you can really see the blade 16's brightness come out I feel like my phone almost exaggerates the contrast even more um you can see in the scene with the popcorn that it's pretty much perfect on the OLED but then the legion IPS display is very noticeably less contrast um one thing my phone also does is sort of exaggerate the blooming effect if you look at the OLED on the right versus the G14 on the left you can see sort of a halo around the Subscribe now um but if I make my phone Focus then it becomes a lot less obvious and that's kind of more how it actually looks in person the blooming is actually not nearly as bad as you would think but a camera just all always makes things look worse but that's when you're going to notice blooming the most is like white text on a black screen you know thin bright objects on a dark background is where you will see blooming the most whereas like a busy busier scenes are really hard to notice it here's another angle from my phone in a bright room you can see the reflections from the OLED display and then here's that bird clip again in a bright room I'm trying to focus more on the blooming so OLED has none don't really see any on the mini LED either in the IPS display again and then this spool is another one where you should see some blooming on mini LED since it's such a bright object on a dark background um really I still on camera you sort of can see some blooming around these like the potato thing here that's just not there on OLED you know then as the exposure goes down it becomes a lot harder to see it and that's more how it actually looks in person so however I do think some people are just more sensitive to it than others this popcorn is another scene where you should see some blooming um when it hits that high exposure you kind of do but even still not too noticeable now the peacock feathers actually do want to talk about for a second so this is really where you you can see that difference in color gamut between the IPS display and mini LED just even an IPS display can have a higher color gamut than the legions here so look how much more the feathers just pop on the blade 16 like just the Vibrance of them is just crazy and this is HDR so it's really taking full advantage of that color gamut whereas the legion when you don't have a wide color gamut and you move it into HDR it actually makes things look a little more washed out but yeah the difference there is crazy same here even with the clothes you can see such a more vibrant pop of color off the blade 16 and then I'm checking for Blooming Again by sort of going on the edge of the display you can kind of notice it a little bit more around the sparklers still not crazy noticeable obviously there's none though on the OLED and where you're going to notice blooming the most is actually just browsing using your cursor on a dark or gray background see how on the blade when I'm moving the cursor you actually see a little glow that kind of moves with it and then same with the G14 with my cursor there I'm moving it around you can see dimming zones kind of moving with it and then of course you know on the OLED display I'm moving the cursor and there's nothing there just looks pretty much perfect because there's no dimming zones and like I said with Asus you can turn that off which is such a nice feature to have because if you are browsing and you don't want to be distracted by that just turn it off you know on the blade unfortunately you don't have that option and this is a cool little clip that really just highlights the importance of the multis Zone dimming switch so like the G14 for example here you know I can turn the multis Zone on and off with just this hotkey and look at the difference in the black levels when I do that when I turn multizone dimming off it's basically the same as the Legion now in fact because it's a little bit brighter it that backlight is actually a little more noticeable on the G14 than it is the legion but the second I hit that multis zone dimming switch now I'm getting those mini LED black levels and it looks much closer to the OLED now but it's just crazy to just switch it back and forth and see the difference that it makes but at the same time it's nice to be able to use your mini LED almost like a standard IPS display if you really wanted to all right and here's where we're starting to see a difference in the dimming algorithms of mini LEDs I have the flow x16 on the left here and the Razer Blade 16 on the on the right you can see a little bit more blooming around the mouse cursor and the YouTube play bar area but what this doesn't actually capture on camera is that those are also just brighter objects and that's why it looks to be like it's blooming more um it's actually I'm going to sound like a broken record but it does look worse on camera doesn't necessarily look as bad in person the FL X6 makes the smaller details pop more um with and this is the 2022 model here whereas the blade will sort of when it's like a smaller white object it'll sort of dim it to sort of hide the blooming and it does a pretty good job and I will say as a side note real quick that the blade 16 actually comes in two flavors of mini LED panel and that's one from aoou and one from Boe now I've heard from a lot of people that the Boe panel has a lot of problems with like lines going across the screen and the dimming algorithm just not being very good and luckily I have the aoou panel here and that one seems to perform really well for making blooming very hard to notice and now if we look at the blade 16 next to the zephrus G14 on the right here the blade on the left this is another example where the G14 it looks like it has a crap ton of blooming here but it's just the exposure of the camera again but you can see the dimming Zone moving around the mouse which you can't really notice on the blade but again the G14 Mouse pointer here is just way brighter than the blade the blad's mouse pointer is getting dimmed um it's hard to explain but really that Mouse pointer is almost like gray on that screen um if you were to see it in person it doesn't actually look white like it does on the G14 now if I change the exposure here you're going to see another little weird artifact that comes from a dimming algorithm and this is just something that seems to only happen on the the blade but as I move the mouse cursor up and down just on the side of the laptop you can see the algorithm kind of start to give way a little bit it's like the algorithm isn't really factoring in the mouse cursor here so it's kind of making it brighter and then dimmer and then brighter and dimmer as you go up and down the edge of the display so I just kind of thought that was interesting that I found this weird little bug while I was doing this um but I mean that's a very minor thing and for the most part you won't really notice that and to be honest this was the first time I ever even noticed that myself you can see when I pull up an image on the display here with the honey that it's like like normally it would be pretty easy to see a glow around it but the dimming algorithm does really well especially with big bright objects and it just you really don't notice the blooming it almost looks exactly like the OLED to me in person and if anything it even pops more than the OLED because it's so bright another area where mini LED will sometimes start to give way is at extremely low brightnesses so you'll see here when I turn the blade 16 down to like 10% brightness or below that that bright objects like these white backgrounds really start Fading Into like a black hole uh whereas on the G14 this one's dimming algorithm handles low brightness a lot better sure it doesn't get quite as dim as the blade but like at least the dimming algorithm isn't giving out and then lastly here are just some pictures I took um to sort of try and find a difference between the mini LED and the OLED but honestly other than a little bit of color calibration the OLED being slightly more red and having less yellow tint to it the contrast is almost identical I mean in the popcorn here you don't really see any blooming even if I zoom in same with the sparkler picture all these screens look pretty much black except for the legion um this one probably makes the legion look the worst here is the end of the video with the thank you for watching message and it's uh that difference is just crazy I mean it's like a a medium gray versus actually complete Black on the blade 16 you know my final thoughts here like I said these are some of the best displays on the market I would really love to see Lenovo in the next year or so pursue more mini LED or OLED displays on their laptops on their gaming laptops and I would love to see more Manu facturers besides just Asus Implement multis Zone dimming switches because that gets rid of the blooming effect that so many people complain about at least during the times where you're going to notice it the most like when you're browsing and hopefully we can see these options expand into a more affordable range you know when all these first came out they were pretty close to the same price other than maybe the blade 16 being the most expensive here um and then over time they've all sort of gone down and gone on sale you know $300 off here 500 off here so it's really been kind of all over the place price-wise with these displays but personally I would pay more to have this on the right versus the one on the left how much more would I pay I don't know that sort of comes down to what other parts of the laptop that I like maybe I like the GPU more on one or the the CPU better on the other or maybe I prefer battery life so I might go for the G14 you know stuff like that so but overall I mean some people are I feel like a little too harsh on mini LED but I feel like it's kind of The Best of Both Worlds with very little compromise like it's to the point now where I pretty much never even notice the blooming unless I'm purposely looking for it but when I'm playing games I don't notice but what I do notice is the insane brightness the brightness difference between mini LED and OLED is just crazy I never have to worry about burning and yes your laptop OLED screen will probably burn in after a few years like it's pretty much inevitable unless you're taking extremely crucial care of it you know there's just so many static elements when it comes to using a laptop daily I mean think about the X in the top right of your screen you know um your taskbar your scroll bars like it's a lot different than using OLED for a TV where there's way fewer static elements there's lots of movement you're watching movies content you're not on pages that have static borders that have static icons like you don't really have that on a TV versus a laptop so yeah in my eyes I would say that mini LED is the winner here um but that's just my personal take I mean I would love to hear your take on this do you wish that there were more mini LED options on the market maybe at lower budgets do you wish there were more OLED options on the market or are you cool with IPS displays and maybe you just like that let me know in the comments below and once again every everybody thanks for watching uh check out my other laptop reviews if you haven't yet and be sure to like And subscribe if you found any of this information useful thanks again and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Craves Tech

Views: 22,347

Keywords: mini-led vs oled, gaming laptop displays, best gaming laptop display, is mini-led worth it in laptops, best display for gaming laptop, gaming laptop mini-led, gaming laptop oled, is oled good for gaming laptops, ips vs miniled vs oled, miniled laptop comparison, oled laptop comparison, which screen looks best for gaming laptop, gaming laptop screen types, led vs oled gaming laptops

Id: kML6MTAw0UY

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2024