For anyone stuck with a shoddy screen, there’s a solution that doesn’t involve buying a brand new laptop. Replacing the screen will save you quite a bit of money while giving your current system a second life and reducing the amount of electronic waste. This guide offers some essential tips for laptop screen replacement.
Most affordable laptops sold today have 60% sRGB IPS displays or, even worse, TN displays, like five or six years ago. AMOLED screens and high refresh rate IPS displays remain a unique feature of laptops costing at least $700 (in reality, it’s $1,000 or more).
A cheap 768p TN display, a decent 1080p IPS display and a great 2160p OLED display have something in common. This is the interface. The vast majority of laptop displays released in the past decade use the eDP interface for data and power. This means one can ditch the terrible screen the laptop comes with for a better option that’s more pleasing to the eye and potentially allowing for additional uses (like photo editing) that weren’t viable. previously.
To be able to make the right choice, it is necessary to know several important differences between the different panels. Panels that use the eDP interface differ in many aspects, including (but not limited to):
The underlying technology and specification of the eDP interface
Diagonal size, resolution, refresh rate, surface type
The way they are held in place
Brightness, contrast ratio, color depth (read color space coverage)
Compatibility with touch inputs
What they were designed for
The last point is the easiest to understand and appreciate. Screens designed for laptops need to be light, thin and have low power consumption, while a screen designed for a TV needs to be bright and have a large display area.
Technology: Avoid TN, be careful with AMOLED
Most laptops that will hit store shelves in May 2023 come with 60Hz IPS (or IPS-like) displays. IPS technology helps achieve decent brightness and contrast ratios, accurate color reproduction, wide viewing angles and reasonably fast refresh rates, all while maintaining relatively low power consumption. The majority of IPS displays for laptops have a two-channel, 30-pin Embedded DisplayPort (eDP) input, while displays with resolutions above 1920 x 1200 are more likely to use an 40-pin eDP connection with 2 or 4 data channels.
TN and VA screens should be avoided. They’re inferior to IPS screens in almost every way, yet they cost almost as much. Apple the MacBook maker, for example, stopped selling its last TN-screen MacBook and its last TN-screen MacBook in 2018.
AMOLED displays are renowned for their exceptional contrast ratios, near-full coverage of NTSC and P3 color spaces, HDR support, and other benefits. These benefits don’t come for free, as these displays require higher bandwidth and significantly more power than their IPS counterparts. AMOLED panels are also quite expensive. A good IPS screen can be purchased for around $70, while the cheapest Samsung laptop AMOLED screen (13.3 inches, 1920×1080) costs twice as much.
Samsung is essentially the only company with a wide range of AMOLED panels for laptops. The Korean giant currently produces several 1080p AMOLED displays with a diagonal of 13.3 and 15.6 inches, which use 2-channel, 30-pin eDP connections. Higher resolution options (2880×1800, 3840×2160, etc.) use the 4-channel, 40-pin eDP connection.
Like the HDMI interface, the DisplayPort interface was designed to be backward compatible. So you’ll probably have no problem plugging an eDP 1.4 display into a laptop that has an eDP 1.3 port on its motherboard, and vice versa. Caution should be exercised with AMOLED panels above 1920×1080 resolution and IPS panels above 3200×1800 resolution; many of them require special data compression modes that laptops released before 2016 are unlikely to be compatible with. Caution is even more in order if you want to get a high refresh rate display (e.g. 1080p 240Hz). Most of these displays require a modern GeForce GTX or GeForce RTX graphics card to function properly. If you have a laptop over five years old, or a really low-end laptop, it would be best to limit your search for a better monitor to the eDP 1.2 spec options.
Once you have the name of the panel, you will be able to consult its specifications; Screens PeoPle is the perfect place to do it. You can also tear off the original cover panel to find a small sticker showing the exact model number. Be careful not to damage the panel when removing the cover; you’ll find short guides on YouTube for most laptops. For reference, most screen covers consist of a cover that the screen and webcam sit on, and a plastic frame that sits on top of the screen and holds it in place by the edges. (A sandwich? Did someone say “sandwich”?) Laptop touchscreens are a different story, where the glass is edge-to-edge on the panel and everything is glued together. Thanks for visiting our site.
