4 Overrated Laptop Screen Features You Shouldn’t Pay For

There are many factors to consider when purchasing a new laptop. The screen, for example, may come with special features regarding refresh rate, resolution, brightness, support for different color spaces, etc. A better display with all the bells and whistles ensures you get better image quality and sharper text, which directly improves your viewing experience. However, when purchasing a new laptop, some display features are overkill for the average buyer. If your work doesn’t look like graphic design and doesn’t demand the best possible screen, some features just aren’t worth paying extra for.

If your job involves browsing different websites, responding to emails, attending virtual meetings, and working on documents, you shouldn’t bother upgrading to a more feature-rich one or paying extra for a laptop model that offers a premium display. To help you avoid wasting money on details you wouldn’t benefit from, we’ve listed four overrated screen features you can skip when shopping for your next model.

Major laptop manufacturers have made high refresh rate displays (anything above 60Hz) one of the biggest selling points of modern laptops. You’ll see brands selling models with 120Hz, 144Hz and even higher numbers, and it’s easy to see why. Some of the benefits offered by laptop screens with high refresh rates include smoother movements when playing video games or scrolling pages, reduced motion blur, and better responsiveness. If you’re buying a laptop for basic use, the marketing might convince you that you need a 120Hz screen.

While it’s true that you can enjoy these benefits, they aren’t necessary for the average laptop buyer. In fact, if your daily laptop use involves regular, mundane tasks like email and meetings, you’re less likely to enjoy the benefits of a high refresh rate laptop screen. For other everyday uses, like browsing the web and watching videos, you’ll do well with a screen that hits the 60Hz standard – there’s no need to pay more for better refresh rates.

OLED is yet another laptop screen feature sold at a premium by manufacturers. OLED offers deeper blacks than LCD because, instead of using a backlight, it uses self-emitting pixels that can turn on and off individually. It also offers more vibrant colors and higher contrast and is generally known to offer higher picture quality than LCD. This is why OLED TVs are generally expensive. There’s no denying that OLED panels are fantastic.

However, for the average laptop user, the advantages that an OLED screen adds over an LCD screen are simply a luxury and not a necessity. The main areas where OLED panels for laptops are welcome are gaming and entertainment. But if you’re doing basic tasks on the device, a good IPS LCD panel can serve you just as well, and you won’t feel like you’re missing out on anything. So, if you are such a person, there is no need to overpay for an OLED screen upgrade.

Another overrated laptop screen feature that you shouldn’t pay more for is 4K resolution. When it comes to displays, the general rule is that the higher the resolution, the better the image quality, as it reproduces sharper and more detailed images. As you might expect, the higher the resolution of a screen, the more expensive it is. HP sells its OmniBook Ultra 14 OLED laptop with a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels in the base configuration, but you can upgrade to a screen with a resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels, paying $70 more.

For normal laptop use, 4K resolution is excessive. The superior image quality is noticeable in videos and images with lots of details. It has little impact on websites, documents, whiteboards, and productivity tools, so you can safely stick to a 1080p display if those are things you’ll see most of the time. If you still want sharp images, you can get a laptop like the MacBook Pro M5 Max we reviewed, which impressed us with its detailed and sharp 3,024 x 1,964 pixel resolution screen between 1,080p and 4K.

You will only benefit from a laptop screen with 4K resolution if you do creative work such as video editing or graphic design. Even for gaming, a laptop with 4K resolution is a tough sell because you need a very powerful CPU and GPU to play games in that resolution and at decent frame rates. For daily use, a quality screen with a resolution of 1080p or 2.5K is more than sufficient.

Touchscreen support in laptops is one of those features that you might think you absolutely need when you don’t. The ability to touch, swipe, or pinch on your laptop seems convenient at first, but not everyone benefits from a touchscreen. Unless your workflow values ​​touch on pen input, this is probably a feature you won’t use enough to justify paying extra. And for many, this is the case.

Several Reddit users admit to ignoring their laptop’s touchscreen functionality or only using it a few times. So if you’re not someone whose job depends on it, you may be overestimating how much you need it and should probably ignore it. There is no need for touchscreen laptops except for a few professionals like digital artists, and if your work does not fall into this category, do not pay extra for such a screen.