Displays don’t receive much love in the wonderful world of laptops. Most manufacturers do little more than slap on a coat of gloss and ship the display out the door, viewing angles and resolution be damned. If you’re lucky, a laptop that you’re looking at will have a high-resolution display available, but this does nothing for the sub-par color reproduction, poor viewing angles and black level troubles most laptop displays exhibit.
There are, however, a few displays that stand out from the crowd. One of them is Dell’s RGB LED, an option on high-end workstations and consumer laptops such as the Dell XPS line. This is supposedly the best displays offered on any laptop, but is it truly great, or another example of marketing hype gone beszerk?
Alphabet Soup
Before we tackle the merits of the display, let’s tackle what the display is – and what all those letters mean.
There are three sets of acronyms at play here. Those are RGB, LED, and LCD. You’re probably familiar with LCD already. It stands for liquid-crystal display, and it’s the basic technology behind virtually all modern flat-panel monitors and HDTVs besides plasmas.
Next up is LED, which you’ve probably encountered before but may not entirely understand. It stands for Light Emitting Diode, and is used in everything from computers to cars. In the case of Dell’s display, LEDs create the light that comes through the LCD, making the images produced visible. This is an advantage because the individual diodes can be turned on or off, which allows for more subtle use of light. By comparison, a standard display will have just a few very bright backlights, and while they can be dimmed, the level of control is minute compared to what can be accomplished with LEDs.
Finally, we have RGB. This simply stands for Red Green Blue. In a display that uses RGB LED technology, some of the LEDs do more than create plain white light. Instead they create light of a specific color. The colored LEDs can be precisely controlled to create accurate color reproduction and a wide color gamut even in very bright or dark images.
The Results
Now you know what that mumble-jumble of letters means, at least in technical terms. But does all of this really have a noticeable effect?
Yes, it most certainly does.
According to testing done by sources such as Anandtech, the RGB LED display on Dell laptops is capable of a color gamut up to 112% of the Adobe RGB standard. That means the display can produce more colors, which results in better color accuracy. By comparison, your average laptop has a color gamut of around 80% to 90%. This means that an image viewed on your average laptop can’t be produced with 100% accuracy because the laptop is incapable of displaying some colors.
The difference between the RGB LED LCD on a Dell laptop and your average display on a competitor’s laptop will be obvious when viewing movies, opening high-resolution pictures, and playing games. One of my favorite movies, for example, is The Dark Knight. This is a very gritty movie, with lots of dark scenes. It’s not much fun to watch on most laptops because the colors in the darker scenes all bleed together into a big mass of black and gray. On a RGB LED, however, the subtle differences in color are visible, making for a more enjoyable experience.
Should You Buy It?
Pinning down the availability of this unique display is difficult because it tends to come in and out of stock on various models. It is a popular display, but also one that is in limited supply, and this means it’s not always an option even on laptops that could potentially support it.
If it is available, however, it’s usually priced at between $100 and $200 extra. That’s not chump change, but it’s actually a reasonable price. If you use your laptop for image editing, or you simply play a lot of games and watch movies frequently, it will be a worthwhile investment.
You must log in to post a comment.