What type of LCD panel does a Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop have?

Dell lists their options like this:

HD+ Widescreen 15.6 inch WLED LCD (1680x945) W/2.0 MP [Included in Price] Full HD Widescreen 15.6 inch WLED LCD (1920x1080) W/2.0 MP [add $75 or $3/month1] Full HD Widescreen 16.0 inch RGBLED LCD (1920x1080) W/2.0 MP [add $250 or $8/month1]

What type of display is this (TN, IPS, VA)? Does it vary based on which option is chosen?

Matthew

Posted 2009-10-26T20:58:06.240

Reputation: 11 686

I've updated the answer - with hopefully something more helpful – ChrisF – 2009-10-26T21:25:13.673

1I own that exact laptop with the RGBLED display and it's AWESOME. Side-by-side with my old Inspiron E1705, it's amazingly vivid. The colors are like CANDY. If you're asking because you are considering getting it, just get it, dude! :D – Chris – 2009-12-15T02:38:22.690

Answers

CCFL is still more efficient energy wise than LED (although LED becomes better each year), but behind an LCD there is a slight difference. The LCD has 3 colour filters per pixel, each letting true a tiny bit of the spectrum. With RGB LED's you can match the spectrum of the filters with the output of the 3 LED's, and that is what makes RGB led efficient for backlighting. Not LED per se. For normal room lighting CCFL still has an edge as the spectrum is more fluent and more natural than the spectrum from LED's, but for backlighting RGB LED's are perfect. This article shows the DELL XPS with RGB backlighting has the best gamut of any display: http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=569

Due too aging differences, both RGB Led and CCFL can colour cast over time. If you equip an RGB LED display with sensors though, it can adjust for this aging. This is what you see in high end Eizo screens for example.

The question for the panel type can be answered with TN. TN with a super-fine pitch, like this 16 inch full-HD panel, is not best for contrast. Normal TN desktop screens can get to 1:1000 today, but in a laptop, expect more like 1:400-500.

So that gives a rather weird situation. A laptop with a not so great panel, equipped with about the best RGB backlight available today. Nice if a display offers a 12 bit or more lookup table, but I guess this DELL hasn't. So what do you want with the enourmous gamut? Sure, Toystory 4 will look great, but for 99% of computer work, sRGB is still the most important colour space. With this RGB LED, realistic sRGB display is out of question, there is no hardware to calibrate the gamut down if you like.

If the upgrade costs much, you might want to skip it and buy a decent desktop screen with the laptop. But the RGB LED might save power compared to the white LED, due to filter optimization.

bert

Posted 2009-10-26T20:58:06.240

Reputation: 931

Okay, I'll take a stab at the RGB question. The backlight of the screen used to be cold cathode type bulbs. Think super thin flourescents. The problem is that they were power hungry. The next generation used a white light LED to save on power. The problem is that there is no such animal as a white LED. The LED is actually a yellow LED with a blue coat. Sometimes that creates a slight shift in color. Slight yellow or yellow green tones are common. You display may show this shift with slightly off color images.

RGB uses pure color Red/Green/Blue LED's. When you focus them together, they create a true white light and this focused through the display should create brighter, truer colors.

Blackbeagle

Posted 2009-10-26T20:58:06.240

Reputation: 6 424

Thanks! This is good information, but I can't accept it as the answer because it doesn't answer the original question. I created a question about this here: http://superuser.com/questions/61141/whats-the-difference-between-wled-and-rgbled-displays. If you want to repost your answer, I'll mark it as accepted there.

– Matthew – 2009-10-26T23:08:07.413

1White LED is a blue led with a yellow Phosphor. You can only convert high energy photons to lower energy ones, not the other way around. RGB LED does not deliver true white light too. White LEDS give a 2 peaked spectrum, RGB LED's a three peaked spectrum. The RGB matches the RGB filters in the panel, thus giving a much wider gamut. Wide gamut CCFL is more like a 20-peaked spectrum, and the only true white is achieved with a traditional bulb, as they have a continious spectrum with all frequencies outputting in a fluent curve. – bert – 2009-11-07T14:07:41.527

Trusted Reviews indicates that the term RGBLED refers to the type of backlight:

RGB LED is the name given to a display that uses red, green and blue (hence RGB) LEDs, as opposed to just white LEDs as a backlight.

NOTE: I've removed the old info which didn't really help.

ChrisF

Posted 2009-10-26T20:58:06.240

Reputation: 39 650

Thanks, but I've read these, and like you said they don't really define what RGBLED is. – Matthew – 2009-10-26T21:08:54.643