LAS VEGAS—Laptops with OLED screens, which offer vivid colors, razor-sharp text, and deep, deep blacks, are few and far between. Following the introduction of two new such laptops at CES this week, though, people who mourned their apparent extinction have reason to get excited.
OLED, short for Organic Light Emitting Diode, shares similarities with the LED and LCD screens used by most modern laptops. Both LEDs and OLEDs emit photons to create the image you see on the screen, but unlike LCDs, which have separate layers, each OLED layer is deposited on the other, creating a monolithic unit.
The result is a screen than not only saves space, offering the possibility of a much thinner, lighter laptop, but also one that offers wide viewing angles, low power, and fast response time for sports and action scenes.
The problem is that OLED screens are difficult—and therefore expensive—to manufacture. In 2017, the actual cost of a 5.7-inch OLED panel for a smartphone was as high as $280. Multiply that by a factor of two for a 12-inch laptop, and the display would quickly become the most expensive component in a $1,000 laptop.
So it wasn't much of a surprise that no new OLED laptops were introduced at CES last year, especially since other display technologies—such as 4K In-Plane Switching (IPS)—panels offer nearly the same quality at much lower costs.
But "nearly the same" isn't good enough for some laptop buyers, and Lenovo and HP appear to have taken that fact to heart, each introducing a new 15.6-inch laptop with an active matrix OLED (AMOLED) panel at CES this year. The HP Spectre x360 15 is a 2-in-1 convertible, while the Lenovo Yoga C730 is a traditional clamshell laptop.
The benefits are clear—Lenovo claims that the Yoga C730 has 1.6 times more color and brightness than an LCD, while emitting 20 percent less blue light to help with eye strain. Unfortunately, it appears that OLED pricing is still high enough to relegate the two new laptops to an extreme niche: The $1,650 Yoga C730 won't even be sold in the US, and HP hasn't yet announced pricing for the OLED version of the Spectre x360, though it does plan to start US sales in March.
Noticeably absent from the OLED laptop game this year is Samsung, one of the pioneers of the technology. Local news reports from Korea suggested that Samsung would introduce an OLED laptop at CES, but that turned out not to be the case. A company spokesperson declined to comment on whether or not it plans to offer OLED laptops.
Things are much more active on the OLED TV front, with LG unveiling a rollable OLED TV that disappears into its stand at CES. That model joins several other LG OLED TVs already on sale.