View from the Labs

There’s no excuse for a poor-quality screen any more

I get it: when building a laptop to a budget, you need to make compromises. Much of this is made obvious by running your finger along our feature table on p70, where you’ll see the specification nudge upwards in direct correlation with the price: Wi-Fi 6E rather than Wi-Fi 6, a Core i7 instead of a Core i5, a 1080p webcam rather than 720p.

Often the differences are more subtle. It’s a lowerquality keyboard or a plastic chassis rather than metal.

Or, even tougher to spot, a 512GB SSD that costs £30 rather than £50. All these cost shavings make a big difference when added together, especially at volume.

But the sacrifice that I’ve seen time and time again this month has been to the quality of the screen. In many cases they’ve been downright poor. There just isn’t any excuse to supply such screens in business laptops in 2023.

Well, let me rephrase that: there is an excuse, because the manufacturers are looking at screens in the same way they do SSDs. Lower specs equal lower prices. Bosh. Nor do I blame the IT decision makers within businesses, who have to juggle their budget somehow.

But there’s a reason why consumer-targeted laptops usually include better screens than their business counterparts: the buyer won’t put up with something that looks appalling. They will send it back. End users in businesses often don’t have that luxury.

So here’s my plea to the manufacturers: cut costs everywhere else, by all means, but don’t force users to stare into the abyss of a washed-out screen for eight hours each working day.