The Considerations in Buying Your Laptop Screens

Buying a laptop might not be the most difficult purchase in one's life but it still has its puzzles, one of which is what screen your future laptop should come with - one that your eyes won't regret perhaps?

While generally true there are some choices you need to make.

Let's take a look at the aspects you should dwell on prior to handing over your credit card.

Screen diagonal size

While no surprise we'll start with the size of the screen as you really need to make this a vital checkmark prior to purchasing. Why? Well for one it's what constitutes the 50% towards whether your eyes will appreciate your choice or not.

If you have problems reading a book without lenses or glasses you might want to test out laptops with larger screens in the range fifteen inches rather than the 13-14 inch offerings.

The size of objects will generally speaking appear larger and thus more comforting for your eyes, especially when reading text. This is especially true if your past your youth, as people's eyesight deteriorates with age it pays to choose the right screen size for your eyes, failing to do this will cause your eyes to focus in more and the strain this imposes on them can lead to further eye deterioration.

If you're more of a gamer than someone who uses your laptop for business use then a larger screen, meaning a seventeen inch or higher diagonal, is a sure fire way to soaking up the eye candy in modern games.

The same holds true for a power user, i.e. do you multi-task a lot and sometimes have separate windows side by side? With a higher screen diagonal size normally comes a higher supported resolution too, which we'll discuss next.

Screen resolution

The other 50% to making your eyes appreciate or dislike your new purchase is screen resolution. In simple English, it's the number of dots called pixels that makeup the screen estate. The higher this number the finer grain the image quality becomes but at the cost of making everything appear smaller.

Laptop manufacturers know this too well and the problems this creates for many people, and thus you'll often find smaller screens i.e. up to 15 inch with resolutions around the 1280x800 mark, conveniently called WXGA.

Larger screens of 17 inches or higher normally have a native resolution of 1920x1080 these days, called HD 1080. Notice how the screen size is only two inches larger in diagonal but the ratio of pixels on screens goes up more than that, especially horizontally.

In practice this means there's a big jump in real estate offered by the latter but only if your eyes can take the additional load this creates. Not only are there more pixels on screen but they are also closer together in a measure known as dot pitch.

Similarly to analysing the screen size, if you have problems reading a book at normal range without additional help then it's very likely a 17 inch HD 1080 resolution screen will be too much for your eyes.

While you always try and work round this by increasing the DPI font size and/or lowering the screen resolution, this will result in a somewhat diminished image quality.

Of course there is no stopping you connecting such laptop to your large scale HD 1080 TV but this only suffices if you're not planning on using your laptop out on the road.

Your best bet is to either try and find an even larger screen laptop i.e. 18-20 inches HD 1080 or step down to the same 17 inch diagonal size but with a slightly lower but also common 1440x900 resolution.

Keep in mind that the larger the screen the bigger and heavier the laptop becomes, this might be a concern if your hand is forced to do a lot of carrying through airports or similarly if you need to cram your hand luggage in the usually tight space overhead lockers found on planes.

Screen finish

This is an aspect people normally have a clear black or white answer to, you either love a glossy finish and hate a matte finish, or vice versa. It can never be something in-between.

While glossy screens aren't necessarily enough to go disliking them they do have several characteristics that can be potentially annoying. Glossy means reflective.

If you use your laptop anywhere near a light source then be sure this will get reflected as will your own face depending at what angle you set your screen. Additionally glossy also means prone to scratches.

While most people don't have cravings to go intentionally testing the resilience of their screen coatings to scratches, the very fine reflective finish is far more likely to scratch than a matte finish, even if for example the cloth you wipe it with contains micro dust particles.

Matte screens aren't prone to these characteristics nearly as much but some people feel their colours aren't as vivid as that on glossy screens. This of course is purely subjective and it's perhaps suffice to say that professional laptop screens i.e. those that comply with strict RGB colour gamma standards are all matte models.

Does this make a glossy screen look cheap? Again, you need to ask your own conscience on this one, some people will agree, others disagree. Most consumer laptops nowadays have glossy screens, most business laptops a matte finish.