T500 WXGA with LED or WSXGA+ with CCFL

What would you guys prefer? I've heard great things about LED, but is it worth a WSXGA+ screen?

 

I myself would go for the WSXGA+ with ccfl because I love higher rezolutions and CCFL would be good enough for me.
Even though LED is so awsome. I would base your decision on weather you need the higher rez or not.

 

i know someone with a T61p, the ccfl screen is dim. so, based on the two whole lenovo screens i'm familiar with (the T61p and my T400 LED), LED crushes ccfl. my 2 cents. also, i'll bet that higher res LEDs will be out soon. you could wait a bit to find out.

 

Hello all,

I've been following the WSXGA LED question for a while now ever since I decided to get a new Thinkpad. I was leaning toward the WSXGA regardless of LED but my coworker showed me something today that made me rethink my position.

Basically, I like having a lot of "real estate" on my laptop since I primarily work with spreadsheets and other office documents. Therefore, I was automatically favoring the high-resolution WSXGA screen. I currently have a 14.1 XGA screen and the icons, text, etc were a little too big for my liking. However, my coworker changed the DPI settings under Display Properties>Settings>Advanced>DPI Settings>Custom Settings (I have an ATI card) so that my DPI was 85% of my normal 96 DPI. And after that, all the text and icons were smaller and yet still sharp. It feels like I have more real estate, both on my desktop and with Excel.

I am not very computer savvy but my question is this: if I can reduce my DPI to give me smaller text, icons, etc while still keeping the same low XGA resolution, do I even need to move up to a higher res WSXGA? I feel like the text and icons would be the same size so I wouldn't see any benefit. The DPI vs resolution thing is really confusing me.

I know that decreasing DPI has no effect on photos or video, whereas increasing resolution would make both appear smaller relative to the screen size (i.e. increase real estate). For my needs, which are mostly spreadsheets and the occasional movie or game, I wonder if I can just get by with decreased DPI and low res WXGA. For movies and games, I would prefer to stay at native resolution rather than scale them to fit a higher resolution screen. I think I read somewhere that WXGA is ideal for DVDs and gaming?

So I apologize for this lengthy and somewhat off-topic post but I'm hoping that anyone can confirm that my observations are accurate? With decreased DPI and smaller text allowing me to fit more on my screen, would this effectively simulate a higher resolution WSXGA screen? Keep in mind that I actually would prefer my photos, games, etc to stay at WXGA resolution...all I want is to fit more text, webpages, documents, windows, on my screen.

Thank you for your help!

 

Well I never downscaled but I always upscaled my DPI depending on my current work, since I have an WUXGA (1900*1200) panel. Nowadays I however change the resolution in Windows instead of changing the DPI settings due to various reasons (menus appear at strange/false positions, up/downscaling also seems to eat cpu power when you i.e. use Internet Explorer, Firefox doesn't scale pages at all - just the menus are scaled and so on).

I'd say go with the native resolution when possible. Vista improved in that regard compared to XP, but it still depends on what application you use and whatnot. And it's still flawed here and there. Btw, in my experience scaling in Linux and font/dpi customization is much better (near perfect).

 

I'm trying to decide between a T400 and T500. I was very disappointed to see that the T500 only offers a WXGA screen with LED backlight. That's the same resolution as my old MacBook, with a 2" larger screen. To see what it's like on a 15.4" screen, I set the resolution on my (work) Latitude D830 to 1200 x 800 and it felt like I was using a Fisher-Price My First Computer. I haven't seen the CCFL vs LED in person, but everyone seems to think LED is much better in appearance, as well as battery life. So...it's looking like a T400 for me.

 

That's interesting, I never tried downscaling DPI. I know people who move up to higher resolution screens because they need bigger real estate will often upscale DPI so they can read text while still being able to work with graphics or photos with high pixel counts. I suppose what you're doing is the reverse. I would imagine things with fixed pixels like images or websites would still remain big. Only the OS would appear smaller (correct me if I'm wrong).

So in a way, that does give you more real estate since your XP or Vista will be able to fit more things in a WXGA screen. However, photos and some other things will not be smaller (if you measured them with a ruler) as though you were looking at them on a WSXGA screen. Only the text will appear smaller.

I think what I'm trying to say is that if you don't need extra pixels (for graphics or web design work), decreasing DPI on a WXGA screen will make the OS resemble that of one on a WSXGA screen (if you compared physical measurements with a ruler). But like ernstloeffel says, some things may not play well with a modified DPI.

So if you want the benefits of a LED screen and downscaling DPI doesn't cause any crazy issues for your regular usage, you might be OK with the WXGA LED screen. I know for gaming at least that the lower resolution is typically better because you can play at native resolution while not overtaxing your GPU. I think I'll try downscaling my DPI on my current laptop, which is WXGA too, to see how things look.

 

I would definitely go with WSXGA+ given a choice between the 2. I have the T61p with the WSXGA+ CCFL backlite screen and it is really nice, I have no complaints at all. It is bright and clear. WXGA is too low of a resolution for me. Sure it might look a little better with the LED backlight but it wouldn't be too useful, can't fit much on the screen.