In terms of sock-it-to-my-eyeballs innovation, few core technologies can match the history and consistency of new screen tech to wow us. From CRT to LCD, from VGA resolution to 4K (and soon enough on to 8K), a procession of steadily more stunning TV and computer screens has marched through our homes over the years. This brings us to one of the most recent advances: OLED.
OLED screen technology has been the latest big feature in modern television sets, offering stunning colors, deep blacks, and amazing overall picture quality. It’s also shown up on late-model high-profile smartphones from Apple and Samsung. So, very big screens and very small screens have seen the advance of OLED, but the ones in the middle, in laptops and on desktops? Not so much…until now.
The technology is finally hitting laptop displays in a modest stream, and 2021 was the year that OLED finally gained laptop momentum, based on some OLED-panel manufacturing trends. The considerations are a bit different on the laptop side, however. While you want TVs to look as good as possible for movies and broadcast programming, the usage case varies from that of a computer. PCs are designed not just for content consumption but for content creation, and laptops have to worry about the pesky necessity that is battery life.
All of these change the ways screen technology needs to work with the product, which leads us to the question: Should you buy an OLED laptop? Let’s dig in. We’ll start with a breakout of our favorite lab-tested OLED laptops, followed by a guide to understanding OLED and how to buy the right machine for you.
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HP Envy 16
Best All-Around OLED Laptop
Bottom Line:
HP’s OLED-screened Envy 16 is poised to upset some famous, four-lettered, 15.6-inch power-user portables.
PROS
- Gorgeous 4K OLED touch screen
- Fancy 5-megapixel webcam
- Great performance and battery life
- Robust GeForce RTX 3060 GPU
CONS
- A bit heavy
- 60Hz display won’t satisfy hardcore gamers
Dell XPS 15 OLED (9520)
Best OLED Laptop for Business Users
Bottom Line:
With the latest Intel processors and a stunning OLED touch screen, the latest Dell XPS 15 is as good as desktop replacement laptops get.
PROS
- Lightning performance with Intel 12th Gen CPUs
- Gorgeous 3.5K OLED touch display
- All-day battery life
- Comfortable keyboard and spacious touchpad
- SD card slot
CONS
- USB-C ports require adapters for many uses
- GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU isn’t a powerhouse
- 720p webcam is a little disappointing
Acer Predator Triton 300 SE (2022)
Best OLED Gaming Laptop
Bottom Line:
The latest remix of the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE is a robust compact gaming rig, pairing a beautiful OLED display with solid components. It’s priced reasonably considering its power, and the base model is a great deal too.
PROS
- Strong overall performance as configured with Intel Core i9 CPU and Nvidia RTX 3060
- Gorgeous high-res OLED display
- 1080p webcam and solid speakers
- Impressive battery life
- Fair price, with the base model a solid value
CONS
- RTX 3060 GPU misses 60fps at max settings at native resolution
- Build quality slightly shy of other premium 14-inch gamers
- OLED display limited to 90Hz refresh rate
Asus Zenbook S 13 Flip OLED
Best OLED Ultraportable
Bottom Line:
The Asus Zenbook S 13 Flip OLED is a slick ultraportable 2-in-1 laptop, with a great OLED touch screen, solid port selection, stellar performance, and long battery life. But in this price range, “great” components are table stakes.
PROS
- Beautiful OLED touch screen
- Magnesium-aluminum alloy chassis
- Included pen
- Touchpad doubles as number pad
- Excellent ports and security features
- Effective performance
- Long lasting, quick-charging battery
CONS
- No pen storage
- No HDMI or Type-A USB ports
HP Spectre x360 13.5 (2022)
Best OLED Convertible
Bottom Line:
The Spectre x360, now in a slightly tweaked screen size, isn’t cheap, but HP’s flagship convertible laptop is a brilliantly engineered, light, long-lived showpiece.
PROS
- Gorgeous 3:2 aspect ratio OLED touch screen
- Elegantly sleek, sturdy design
- Great performance and battery life
CONS
- No HDMI port (but mini dock included)
- No internal pen storage or LTE mobile broadband
- Keyboard layout a little disappointing
Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook
Best OLED Chromebook
Bottom Line:
Cool with Chrome OS in tablet form? A 13.3-inch OLED touch screen makes Lenovo’s second, bigger version of its Chromebook Duet a surprisingly nice 2-in-1 detachable for the money.
PROS
- Superb OLED display in an under-$500 detachable
- High-quality front and rear cameras
- Comes with keyboard cover and kickstand
CONS
- Ho-hum compute performance
- No audio jack, or 4G or 5G LTE option
- Stylus supported, but costs extra
Asus ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED (H5600)
Best OLED Laptop for Raw Content-Creation Speed
Bottom Line:
The Asus ProArt Studiobook 16 is an impressive laptop made with content creators in mind, from its versatile input dial and 4K OLED screen to its high-flying AMD and Nvidia components.
PROS
- Gorgeous 16-inch, 4K OLED display with high color gamut coverage
- Unique Asus Dial provides contextual input for Adobe Creative Suite apps
- AMD Ryzen 9, Nvidia RTX 3070 GPU ready for demanding creative workloads
CONS
- Keyboard truncated to make room for dial
- Slow storage throughput in testing
Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XC
Best OLED Laptop for Content Creators Who Also Game
Bottom Line:
Whether you’re tackling tough content-creation jobs or gaming after hours, Gigabyte’s Aero 15 OLED XC is a lavishly equipped, surprisingly affordable power laptop, packing GeForce “Ampere” silicon and a sterling screen.
PROS
- Blazing performance
- Beautiful 4K OLED screen is Pantone certified, factory calibrated
- Plenty of ports
- Show-off RGB keyboard
CONS
- Badly placed webcam
- No security-cable notch
Asus Vivobook Pro 16X OLED
Best OLED Laptop for Traveling Design Pros
Bottom Line:
Asus’ Vivobook Pro 16X OLED is an attractive package all around, thanks to a 4K OLED display, a speedy Ryzen 9 CPU, long battery life, and a standout touch dial tool.
PROS
- Eye-catching 4K OLED display with wide color coverage
- AMD Ryzen 9 has ample performance for content creation
- LED touchpad dial tool for creative apps
- Long battery life
CONS
- GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU is decent but falls short for the toughest professional workloads
- USB-C port lacks Thunderbolt support
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo
Best OLED Laptop With Twin Screens
Bottom Line:
The Asus ZenBook Pro Duo is a thoughtful, albeit pricey, reinvention of the laptop, with a second screen in the keyboard base and an Intel Core i9 processor that should appeal to creative professionals with resource-intensive workflows.
PROS
- Unique ScreenPad Plus second display simplifies workflows.
- Main display is an OLED panel.
- Excellent design and build quality.
- Intel Core i9 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 offer computing muscle.
- Included stylus and wrist rest.
CONS
- Cramped keyboard and touchpad.
- No SD card reader.
- Heavy.
- Short battery life.
Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon
Most Stylish OLED Laptop
Bottom Line:
Its keyboard is a little shy of ThinkPad standards, but Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon is a 14-inch ultraportable with a dazzling OLED display for hundreds less than competitors.
PROS
- Gorgeous OLED touch screen with 2.8K resolution
- Lively eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 processor
- Sleek and lightweight
CONS
- Lackluster keyboard
- HDMI and USB Type-A dongle instead of onboard ports
- No SD or microSD card slot
Buying Guide: The Best OLED Laptops for 2023
You might be asking: What is an OLED display, anyway?
To answer that, we’ll start by getting into the details of OLED screens, and what advantages they are meant to bring. For starters, the acronym OLED stands for “organic light-emitting diode”; more on that in a moment. The short explanation is that OLED technology is similar to traditional LED technology—the same concept of light-emitting diodes—but rather than the screen producing light using only semiconductors, organic molecules are employed (putting the “O” in OLED). The end result is brighter screens with more vibrant colors, hence the appeal of using it in TVs and computers. OLEDs also tend to use less power, all else being equal.
If you’re interested, here’s a slightly more technical explanation. The various kinds of LCD screens—the kinds you’ve gotten used to in most laptops and TVs over the past decade—whether, TFT, VA, or other technologies, all share a similar base concept. They use a white LED backlight source that pushes light through filters. That light is gated at the pixel level by liquid crystals in various states and orientations, which blocks or tints the light to generate pixels of the desired color. In simple terms, OLED screens use a different display paradigm: an organic compound that is self-emissive in terms of light, allowing each pixel in the panel to produce its own light when current is applied.
The Asus Vivobook Pro 16X OLED
(Credit: Molly Flores)
That’s the main difference from LCD screens, and what enables them to produce extra-brilliant colors and deep blacks. Notably, OLEDs offer “truer” blacks than other mainstream screen technologies can when showing a dark or totally black image. When an LCD panel is displaying black, light is still being pushed behind the pixels in play, but they are shuttered to present to your eyes as dark space. In OLED screens, the individual pixels on the portions of the screen showing black are truly displaying nothing, so there’s no light leakage from the back to dilute the darkness. This, in turn, provides better contrast and deeper blacks than simply filtering out an ever-present LED backlight.
All of this also allows a panel to be more efficient, and thus thinner. That doesn’t come into play with laptops as dramatically as with OLED TVs; many OLED TVs are nearly razor-thin.
Should You Buy an OLED Laptop?
Of course, this beauty comes at a price. OLED laptop configurations are more expensive than traditional display options, and the OLED screen option will often be included only in the priciest variant in a laptop family. Part of this cost-boosting is that this new wave of laptop OLED panels—all manufactured by Samsung at this point—are mostly, but not all, 4K-resolution screens, upping the price further by requiring appropriate supporting components. That’s another reason why OLED is usually in the top-most model of a given laptop family. A 4K native resolution and cutting-edge screen technology represent the most premium version of any given machine. (That started to change in the latter half of 2021, with some lower-resolution 13.3-inch OLED panels hitting the market in machines like the Lenovo Ideapad Duet 5 Chromebook.)
If you’re interested in an OLED display but unsure whether you can justify it, you could base your decision on the simple fact that they’re incredible to look at, for the reasons described above. OLED is not strictly necessary, but then, neither is 4K resolution, and many tech features start as luxuries before becoming standard. If you’re buying a new panel nowadays, adopting a technology that is only poised to become more popular is a solid decision, and most OLED panels we’ve seen look superb. If you want to buy a screen just because it makes watching videos, playing games, and even staring at your desktop look amazing, we can’t argue with that. But whether or not the added cost is worth it is up to you and your budget.
The creator-focused Asus ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED (H5600)
(Credit: Molly Flores)
Specific types of users should consider some more granular pros and cons. Gamers will enjoy eye-popping visuals, and the fantasy and sci-fi settings of many titles are ideal for both deep blacks and vibrant colors. However, virtually no laptop hardware is equipped to play in 4K at 60 frames per second, so most gamers will have to dial down the resolution to 1440p or 1080p. That’s not the end of the world, since you can still view other content in 4K, but you are paying extra for 4K resolution to get OLED because the two are intertwined in many laptops so far. Not playing at your laptop’s native resolution may feel like a waste to some, but as it stands, that could be a cost of attaining an OLED panel.
There’s also the issue of the refresh rate. An increasing share of modern gaming laptops come equipped with 120Hz, 144Hz, and even up to 300Hz displays to show more frames per second in competitive games. The first wave of 4K OLED panels was locked at 60Hz, but a bunch of higher-refresh options since. Going higher in the future will only cost more money, but professionals who can benefit from a higher refresh rate (or want this feature for other uses, like gaming) should look into some 4K 120Hz options.
If you are gaming, a 60Hz refresh rate is a fine fit for AAA titles where appearance is more important than frames, but many gamers play both big-budget blockbusters and the hottest battle royale or MOBA. It’s another tradeoff you’ll have to make for picture quality, as good as it is, though even many budget laptops today come with a higher-than-60Hz refresh rate.
Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XC
(Credit: Zlata Ivleva)
Also, consider some of the nuances of that. It takes a tip-top GPU to push frame rates in excess of 60 frames per second (fps) at 4K and high detail settings with many modern AAA titles. In practical fact, if you’re playing the Far Crys and Battlefields of the world, and even if you have a high-end GPU, you can’t expect to hit 120fps or 144fps at 4K and high detail settings, anyway. (Even the latest GeForce RTX 30 Series or, probably, the upcoming RTX 40 Series laptop GPUs will be hard-pressed.) So the 60Hz refresh rate of the screen won’t matter as much.
The 60Hz limit is more of an issue if you’re an aficionado of older games, or of less-demanding but highly competitive esports titles (CS:GO, Fortnite, Apex Legends) in which maximum frame rates are life-and-death matters. For those kinds of games, an OLED will have you leaving frames on the floor—unless you land one of the very new 90Hz models.
OLED-equipped Dell XPS 15
(Credit: Molly Flores)
Meanwhile, OLED also has different considerations for creative professionals. If your job requires careful use of color matching or accuracy, choose your laptop carefully; different OLED laptop manufacturers make different claims about which color gamuts get full coverage, even with many of the laptops using the same panel. Note that Pantone validation is an aspect of some machines, notably several models from Gigabyte.
If you know how to tune and calibrate displays for professional work, you should be able to tune the OLED to better results than out-of-the-box settings. Largely, the color coverage and accuracy are and should be good enough for most casual and prosumer use cases.
Beyond the display, for our general laptop buying advice, including what components to look for given your needs and budget, check out our roundup of best overall laptops, as well as our guide to the best gaming laptops.
How Does OLED Affect Laptop Battery Life?
As explained previously, when an OLED screen is displaying black on some or all of the screen, the pixels on those portions of the display are turned completely off. Because of that, the screen should use less power when showing black-dominant images, or videos with more black segments. This also holds true even if the scene or image is not completely black, just dark because the pixels are still using less power.
To leverage this OLED trait, we’ve found that most OLED laptop makers are shipping their systems with Windows’ Dark mode turned on, so no more juice than necessary is spent displaying your windows, folders, and taskbar. In our reviews of the first bunch of OLED laptops we received at PC Labs, we tested the impact of both OLED screens and Dark mode on battery life.
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The Dell XPS 13 OLED (9310)
(Credit: Molly Flores)
You can visit the individual reviews for more details—the reviews of the Razer Blade 15 and the Dell XPS 15 (7590) in particular include this information—but the takeaway is that Dark mode could be the chocolate to OLED’s peanut butter. Using it delivered a noticeable improvement in battery life in our tests. OLED really does use up more juice displaying white pixels, and even pumping up the brightness to the max in Dark mode has much less of an impact than it does with white screens. Using Dark mode and watching videos with a lot of black or dark scenes could add up to hours of additional battery life. (Hello, Game of Thrones reruns!) Generally, OLED is a power saver, and this aspect only adds to the potential savings.
It may feel like overkill to think you have to monitor how much black or dark space is being displayed on your screen at any one time, but we wouldn’t obsess over it. Generally, with OLED, keeping Dark mode on (or switching to it when you’re going to be using your system off the charger) should make difference enough. But you may want to keep that desktop wallpaper dark, too!
What Kinds of OLED Laptops Can I Buy?
For now, the field of laptops with OLED screens is small versus the whole field of laptops. The relative handful we have tested here is promising, and a little varied, but not as varied as the larger laptop market. OLED options have been entering more product lines over the last couple of years or so (OLED-screened Chromebooks are now a thing too), and manufacturers most often reserve OLED panels for their top-end, premium models. Given the price of OLED, and most of the panels so far being tied to 4K native resolutions, this makes sense, but there is a slow but sure proliferation of OLED screens to less expensive laptops, too.
The road-ready Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon
(Credit: Molly Flores)
This leads us to the exact types of laptops we’ve seen so far. Generally, they have been high-end desktop-replacement laptops and ultraportables with optional OLED screens, as well as powerful gaming machines. The former—laptops like the Dell XPS 15 OLED (9520) and the HP Spectre x360 14 convertible—are perhaps a better fit. These jack-of-all-trades laptops may have you watching 4K streaming videos, looking at photos, and maybe doing some content-creation work, depending on the components. Entry-level discrete graphics is an option in some of these laptops, which ought to enable some light gaming at resolutions below 4K. Everything you’re doing benefits from OLED, without many downsides other than the price.
HP Spectre x360 13.5 (2022)
((Credit: Molly Flores))
OLED screens in gaming-specific laptops are more the exception than the norm. They usually appear as an add-on option, but more recently manufacturers have opted for super-high-refresh displays over OLED for gaming laptops. Razer and Alienware, for example, have opted for 300Hz displays in their premium flagship gaming laptops, leaving OLED for other models or removing them as an option altogether. If you do still see the option offered in a gaming laptop you’re considering, you may have to choose between OLED or high refresh, or at least limit the refresh rate ceiling to acquire an OLED screen (though only more competitive multiplayer gamers are likely to care).
The type of specialty laptops likely to include OLED screens are increasingly not gaming machines, but creator laptops. Aimed at creative professionals, these help users enhance their video editing, color-matching work, and the like. It’s not exactly essential for these users, but the gains are clear, and the downside of a limited refresh rate does not apply.
So, What Is the Best OLED Laptop to Buy?
The main, clear upside to OLED screens is how stellar they look. That alone may well be worth the money to you—though, as we’ve explained, OLED poses clear costs in dollars and more abstract ones. These panels are not for everyone, and paying well into four figures for a laptop with one is an investment.
It will be a while until OLEDs make it into a wider range of laptops and the cost comes down, but for now, they’re a joy to behold and we’re glad they’re here. If your budget can swing it, check out our recommendations and spec breakout below for the top OLED-bearing laptops that PC Labs has tested.
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