T500 (wsxga/ccfl) VS T500 (wxga/LED) dilemma

I've been stressing over this decision and would like to ask your collective advice. I have a T500/wsxga/ccfl and a SL500/wxga/ccfl for comparison. I may be able to get a T500/(?)/LED. I have to assume the LED resolution will only be wxga -please correct me if you know otherwise about the 15" LED screen resolution. If it arrives here in wsxga I will be incredibly happy.

I use a T41P now at 1400x1050 and when I switch to the 15" T500 wxga (ccfl) everything feels huge. The 1680x1050 of the wsxga feels better than the wxga (1280x800) but that means foregoing the LED backlight. I do travel a good bit and like the greater battery life of the LED. I've also had the CCFL die on a couple of my previous T series and would love to get away from those. Lastly it would be magic to work outdoors as I understand the LED screen makes possible.

A gaming friend of mine indicated that one should always be working at the native resolution of the screen and that he prefers the wxga - even on his 17". I find it quite difficult to evaluate the difference the LED makes from just the reviews - great as they may be. It feels as if there is some kind of nuance to this decision beyond just the obvious - brightness & battery vs screen real-estate. Am I missing something? What would you do?

I'd just drop to the nicely portable discrete graphics T400 LED except that I do like the extra space and improved graphics afforded by the 15". I realize that this may fall in the category of personal preference so my apologies up front for posting a question that may have "no right answer", but this board has such experts and is such a fantastic community that I believe y'all may be able to guide me in this decision that I have stressed over far too much already. Thanks in advance for your advice - it is greatly appreciated.

 

LED seems nice but if I had to work on a WXGA screen on a 15", I think I would go crazy. I have looked at the MBP LED screen when they were one of the few using them, and it was ok, not great looking to me. There really is no space to do anything other than run a game or look at one webpage maximized. Maybe the LED screen would be nice and bright to look at but after the first few minutes of looking at it what are you going to do? I think you will be annoyed with using it, since you are already used to higher res screens. My vote goes for the higher res screen. And if you can get that in LED, so much the better. I have the WSXGA+ CCFL screen in my T61p and I have no complaints. The LCD is much better than a lot of LCDs(desktop and laptop) that I have used and am using right now, very happy with it. In fact before I had this machine I had bought a T61 with WXGA res and it so bothered me that I made a bad decision, that I sold it even before opening it.

BTW - I have a nice 17" Sony glossy desktop monitor that is like the best screen I have ever seen, but it is low res and is driving me crazy. It is nice for gaming though. I can't do anything much with it since the res is like 1280x1024. I am constantly minimizing and maximizing windows.

Of course you are the final judge.

 

I can empathize with you because I'm in a similar situation. There has been very few reviews of the LED screen on the T500 - aside from the resolution difference, I don't know if it has the same specs as the T400 LED i.e. in brightness, contrast etc. Or maybe it's because the T500 is still way overpriced for the US market (Lenovo Canada already enjoyed a big price drop on the T500 AND the LED availability...Americans are still waiting). Anyway, one user did post his review here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=303397

It seems like the contrast on the T500 LED is a bit lacking. There are no side by side comparisons unfortunately. I think Fire Snake is right - you'll probably have no complaints about the CCFL lighting but you will be unhappy with the low resolution if you go with the LED WXGA option.

By the way, can I ask why it is important to stay at the native resolution for gaming? Given that Thinkpads aren't really gaming machines, does this mean you can't play games at fullscreen? Especially if you have a high res WSXGA screen?

 

Fire Snake - I like your logic on the screen use. Methinks you are absolutely right about using such a low resolution on a relatively large screen. The lower brightness of the ccfl I can accustom myself to, but the low resolution will be frustrating forever.

sfpassn - thanks for the link - that review was indeed quite helpful!

As to the native resolution thing - I have no idea. I'm not much of a gamer but my gaming friend is all about the displays, graphics cards, etc. so I sought his advice. Apparently context matters. <smile>

For what it's worth, when I compare the brightness of my T500 (& the SL500) to that of my older T41, the 500 was so much brighter that I was positive that I had somehow received an LED screen. It really is quite bright. Unfortunately my experience so far is that the battery life on the 6-cell T500 (discrete) running XP is quite short - perhaps 2.5 hours. It'd be nice to have the additional battery life but it sounds like the wsxga is the right way to go.

Thanks for your insight!

 

I am not a big time gamer but, No you can play games at fullscreen, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, you want to make sure you run your laptop at whatever native resolution that it came with. So if your screen has a max res of 1680x1050(WSXGA+), run it at that. If you lower the resolution, the screen will be blurry and the quality won't be as good. This is common to most if not all LCD screens and holds true for gaming use or other use. Many games however change the resolution to what it runs at. The further that change is from your native, the worse the picture will look.

Second, many gamers choose a lower res screen from my understanding. This is because the higher the res of the screen, the harder the graphics card will have to work to display the game. This is especially apparent in First Person Shooter games where the more frames per second, the better. The graphics card can pump out more frames per second on a lower res display than a higher res one.

 

No problem. I think you will like the WSXGA+. My next machine will be WSXGA+ or even WUXGA. It honestly seems there is a lot of variability in the screens used by all manufactures these days. I saw three different thinkpads in person and they all had different quality screens. I saw a R61(had a good bright screen), a T61 14.1"(had an ok screen) and a Z61 15.4"(had a crappy screen, could barely see it at max brightness). My T61p however has an excellent screen like I said above. When I first got it I thought they accidentally threw in a flexview screen. I don't know, maybe I am just easy to please.

 

i fail to see the led option on the US lenovo site..

 

It doesn't exist (yet), try the Canadian site.

 

Thanks for clarifying the native resolution issue up. I'm using an old T40 and the most advanced gaming I've done in terms of graphics is Diablo 2, but even then it's windowed at 800x600 so I haven't noticed any issues in upscaling. But if I want to play newer games on my T500 at native resolution, maybe it would be wiser to get a lower res screen. I never really considered if my graphics card suited my screen before...hmm something to think about now.

 

I'd say higher resolution is usually the best. After I made the switch 2 years ago from XGA (on a T30) to SXGA+ I will not want to look back. Maybe having a secondary laptop a WXGA+ LED resolution would be good, but I guess newer Thinkpads with 'old' CCFL technology still have good panels. My T61 SXGA+ LCD panel has backlight issues at the bottom of the screen, but who cares, I still love the machine. I'm curious to see how the WUXGA resolutions looks like in real life.

 

It really depends on what your priorities are. If it is gaming mainly then yeah, you should probably think about the screen res/GPU. If your main use of the machine is office type work and multitasking then you should look more into the screen res than the gpu. I play games on my machine once in a while, but I am not playing very new games on it. I can play DOOM3 at ultra high setting with native res(1680x1050) with no problems. Games like Crysis are another story

I would really love to try a WUXGA screen on a 15.4" machine, but I can't find them anywhere.

 

That's true - I primarily use my laptop for work/school so the extra space will definitely be useful. The game I play most often is minesweeper , usually while I am impatiently waiting for something to load, so you can tell I'm not a hardcore gamer. That being said, I do like the flexibility to play a slightly more graphically demanding FPS once in a while.

I did a little more reading into the native resolution issue and it seems like modern video cards do a pretty good job at scaling and antialiasing so that you can play a game at less than native settings (to match your video card's capabilities) but display it fullscreen (to match your screen's resolution capabilities). Of course, I don't play a lot of graphically intensive games so to my casual eye the upscaling might look OK when more serious gamers would find issue with the graphics.

Now if only Lenovo will drop the price of the discrete graphics T500!