Mobile Roundup: A Trio of Midrange Laptops

Display Quality

The last area we want to test is the display quality. We have stated repeatedly that laptop LCDs pale in comparison to typical desktop LCDs, and unfortunately we see that trend continue, although we do have some small cause for hope. We test color accuracy using ColorEyes Display Pro, and we test with two different colorimeters. The first is a DTP-94 we have been using for some time, but we have added an i1 Display2. We test both colorimeters with ColorEyes Display Pro, generating both LUT and Matrix color profiles. The reason we do this is that some displays respond better to LUT profiling while others work better with Matrix profiling. We select the best result out of the four tests for our color accuracy charts. The change from Monaco Optix XR has also invalidated our previous color gamut results, so we will only have color gamuts for select laptops. (We use the matrix color profiles for gamut, as they usually have ~10% higher gamut volume.) We will also report the LCD brightness and contrast ratio.

We've commented already about how much we like the Acer LCD and how poor the M-152XL display looks, and here we have objective confirmation of our analysis. The Acer display isn't as bright as the other two laptops, but the improvement in color quality is immediately noticeable. It has the second highest color gamut we've measured on any laptop to date, and while the ASUS G2P LCD is better in some aspects, we prefer the higher resolution 1080P display. Meanwhile, the M-152XL places near the bottom in color gamut, contrast ratio, and delta E - in fact there's a bit of a trend with Gateway and less than stellar LCDs. We'll forgive more on the P-7811, since it's a great gaming value, but $1100 for the M-152XL/M-153XL only to get one of the worst LCDs we've experienced is a tough sell. Not everyone will agree, but I would much rather spend more money to get a better LCD (for desktops as well); the budget laptops may be almost as fast in many tasks, but poor contrast and brightness are a deal breaker for me.