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LCD vs. LED vs. OLED

The LCD

The first type of display you need to understand is also perhaps the most familiar to you: the LCD, or Liquid Crystal Display. LCD technology has been used in laptops since they first appeared on the market, and uses a series of liquid crystals which conduct a current of electricity to create images on the screen. These types of displays are easy to make and thus less expensive to use than some of the newer types of display technology. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for when it comes to computer displays, and the LCD falls at the lower end of the spectrum where quality is concerned.

LED technology

Light Emitting Diode technology has been around for decades, and is now used in some laptops as backlighting. You probably know it best from its use as the backlight in your cell phone. The advantages of using LED lighting primarily center on its ability to provide uniform lighting that offers a wide range of angles for viewing. Simply put, with LED lighting, you can look at your laptop display from almost any angle and still make sense of what you see. LED holds a tremendous amount of potential for actually lowering the cost of laptops over time, since the lighting technology is so easy and inexpensive to produce. Once it has been further integrated into laptop design, prices will inevitably come down.

Note: Both of LCD and LED screens are TFT LCD screens but using difference backlight. LED version is a LCD screeens using LED backlight instead of florescent (CCFL) backlight that use in normal LCD.

The OLED

The latest technology being pushed by laptop makers is the OLED - or Organic Light Emitting Diode - display. Using polymers that can be made from almost any organic material, the OLED technology is supposed to be superior to other types of laptop display lighting, since it requires no backlighting. That change has the benefit of reducing the power consumption of any laptop with the technology, which should not only save power but improve the battery life of laptops using OLED in the future.