Spectre x360–15 AMOLED laptop has exciting screen

AMOLED displays are used in many applications today –––and are most common in smartphones. These displays can light up or turn off each of their pixels independently, and that means that they can offer better and more natural colours than LCD screens.
OLED is the actual display technology in high-end smartphones and TVs for a few years now for good reason: it combines rich colours with a wide range of contrast and inky-deep blacks. There have been a few laptops released over the years with OLED screens in them, but none ever became particularly popular. Early OLED laptops struggled with high battery consumption and high prices, which made them hard to accept compared to the more price- and power-efficient LCD screen options.
This year, there are a number of new laptops on the market with OLED screen options and without exorbitant markups. Lenovo, Razer, and HP all have announced or released OLED laptops with similar display specs across the board. They all have 15-inch touchscreen panels with 4K resolution and 60Hz refresh rates.
HP Spectre x360 15 AMOLED for the past few weeks, which puts one of those panels in the refreshed Spectre x360 design that was released last year. Price is high $1,999, a not-insignificant $400 premium over an LCD-equipped version with the same specs.
The Spectre x360 15’s display is terrific, and I see no reason why someone would pick an LCD over this OLED, given the option. It is worth the higher cost. The screen is bright, colorful, pixel-dense, and has those trademark rich blacks that have made OLED screens so desirable in phones and TVs. Unfortunately, the wonderful screen doesn’t make up for the HP’s abysmal trackpad, so I don’t recommend running out and buying this laptop in any configuration. But what it does show is that OLED laptops’ time has come.
The most noticeable thing is how punchy and vibrant the screen is. Colours look like they great, but they aren’t so overly saturated that they appear cartoonish. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the blacks are as inky and deep as they are on an OLED TV. Watching Netflix in 4K on this screen is truly a delight.
In terms of colour reproduction, the OLED displays 100 percent of the wide-gamut DCI-P3 spectrum (compared to 82.2 percent on the LCD HP), which means the greens and reds are extra rich and deep. It has a rated contrast ratio of 462,989:1, which is what provides those deep blacks. It also emits less blue light than LCD screens, so much so that HP didn’t feel the need to include any of the extra blue light-blocking filters or software that have started popping up on laptops with LCD panels.
The Spectre also has excellent viewing angles — which is useful if user flipping it around into the various positions of a 2-in-1 computer — and it doesn’t have any ghosting or weird artifacts when scrolling quickly. This isn’t an ideal screen for gaming since its refresh rate is the standard 60Hz and not 144Hz, but for any other purpose, it’s incredible.
On paper, the x360’s screen isn’t as bright as on other premium laptops, like the MacBook Pro. It tops out at just over 350 nits, which is plenty bright to use in any sort of indoor environment, but it might be tough to see outdoors on a sunny day.
That isn’t to say the Spectre is slow. It’s more than adequate for daily productivity work, photo editing, and even some light video editing. Processing power isn’t as fast as other laptops in this class or even HP’s higher-end x360.
For battery life is just over six hours between, which consists of browsing the web in Chrome, using Slack, email, Word, and Twitter with the screen at 50 percent brightness. That’s about average for a 15-inch laptop in my experience, so the OLED screen isn’t really hitting the battery too much more than normal. (HP rates the battery life at 13.5 hours, but that’s based on a looping video test, not actual work, so take it with a grain of salt.)
The rest of the Spectre x360 15 AMOLED is basically the same as the Spectre x360 13 I reviewed earlier this year, with the exception of the additional number pad next to the keyboard and a full-size HDMI port in addition to the two Thunderbolt 3 ports.
The keyboard is easy enough to type on, the hinge is flexible and sturdy at the same time, and there are enough ports available that I can leave dongles at home. It also has a physical switch to turn off the webcam, precluding the need to put a gross sticker or cover over it.
It is large and has a smooth glass finish and reassuring click, but scrolling with it is miserably choppy, multifinger gestures are slow and frustrating to execute, and it has poor palm rejection.
The root of these problems, once again, appears to be HP’s use of Synaptics drivers instead of Microsoft’s far superior Windows Precision drivers, which almost all of the Windows laptop world has switched over to. HP appears to finally be changing course with some of its most recent models and finally adopting Precision trackpads, but sadly, this Spectre isn’t one of those.
— Internet