OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology is a recent advance that's revolutionized portable computing at first sight. OLED screens flaunt stunningly vivid colors, unbeatably deep blacks, and outstanding overall picture quality. In 2021, OLED tech arrived in laptops, mostly high-end ultraportables and gaming rigs, and now has spread to almost all categories and price ranges. PCMag has more than 40 years in the computer-review game, and our expert analysts apply collective decades of experience to testing these new laptops on every metric, including brightness, color depth, and battery life. Our authority in the field equips us to judge the best OLED laptops and publish verdicts you can trust. The Asus Zenbook 14X OLED (Q420) is our current choice as best OLED notebook for most people, but read on for additional picks across more-specific use cases, plus general OLED screen shopping advice and a handy spec comparison.

You might be asking: What is an OLED display, anyway?

To answer that, we'll start by getting into the details of OLED screens, and what advantages they are meant to bring. As we said, the acronym stands for "organic light-emitting diode." The short explanation is that OLED technology is similar to traditional LED technology—the same concept of light-emitting diodes—but rather than produce light using only semiconductors, these panels make use of organic molecules. The result is brighter screens with more vibrant colors, hence the appeal of using the tech in TVs and computers. OLED displays also tend to use less power than their rivals, all else being equal.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

If you're interested, here's a slightly more technical explanation. The various kinds of LCD screens—the kinds you've gotten used to in most laptops and TVs over the past decade, whether TFT, VA, or other—all share a similar base concept. They use a white LED backlight source that pushes light through filters. That light is gated at the pixel level by liquid crystals in various states and orientations, which block or tint the light to generate pixels of the desired color. OLED screens use a different display paradigm: an organic compound that is self-emissive in terms of light, allowing each pixel in the panel to produce its light when current is applied.

That's the main difference between OLED and LCD screens, and what enables the former to produce extra-brilliant colors and deeper blacks. FOr the latter, OLED panels offer truer blacks than other mainstream screen technologies can. When an LCD panel shows black, the backlight can still leak through the shutter. In OLED screens, black pixels are literally turned off, with no light leakage from behind to dilute the darkness. This provides far better contrast than filtering out an ever-present LED backlight.

All of this also allows for more efficient and hence thinner panels, even though the last benefit doesn't come into play with laptops as dramatically as with OLED TVs. Many of the latter are nearly razor-thin.

Should You Buy an OLED Laptop?

Of course, this beauty comes at a price. OLED configurations are generally more expensive than traditional display options, often included in the pricier variants of a laptop family. This is no longer exclusively the case, however, having changed since the first wave of laptop OLED panels (which were all manufactured by Samsung and mostly only 4K-resolution screens).

Today, you'll find plenty of lower-end configurations and even some budget or entry-level models (like the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Touch (UM3406)) with OLED screens. It still holds that 4K resolution and cutting-edge screen technologies are found in the most premium versions of any given laptop. Still, many of our picks these days have lower resolutions than 4K.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

If you're interested in an OLED display but unsure whether you can justify it, you could base your decision on the simple fact that they're incredible to look at. OLED is not strictly necessary, but then, neither is 4K resolution, and many tech features start as luxuries before becoming standards. If you're buying a new panel nowadays, adopting a technology that is only poised to become more popular is a solid decision, and most OLED panels we've seen look superb. If you want to buy a screen just because it makes watching videos, playing games, and even staring at your emails look amazing, we can't argue with that. But whether or not the added cost is worth it is up to you and your budget.

Specific types of users should consider some more granular pros and cons. Gamers will enjoy eye-popping visuals, and the fantasy and sci-fi settings of many titles are ideal for both deep blacks and vibrant colors. However, only the highest-end laptop component hardware is equipped to power games in 4K at 60 frames per second, so most gamers will have to dial down the resolution to 1440p or 1080p. That's not the end of the world, since you can still view other content in 4K, but you are paying extra for 4K resolution to get OLED because the two are intertwined in many laptops so far. Not playing at your laptop's native resolution may feel like a waste to some, but as it stands, that could be a cost of attaining an OLED panel.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

There's also the issue of the refresh rate. An increasing share of modern gaming laptops come equipped with 120Hz, 144Hz, and even up to 300Hz displays to show more frames per second in competitive games. The first wave of 4K OLED panels was locked at 60Hz, but a bunch of higher-refresh options have been released since. Going higher in the future will only cost more money, but professionals who can benefit from a higher refresh rate should look into some 4K 120Hz options. Some gaming machines now have an appealing combination of a high refresh rate, OLED technology, and sub-4K resolutions.

If you are gaming, a 60Hz refresh rate is a fine fit for AAA titles where appearance is more important than frames, but many gamers play both big-budget blockbusters and the hottest battle royale or MOBA. It's another tradeoff you'll have to make for picture quality, as good as it is, though even many budget laptops today come with higher-than-60Hz refresh rates.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Also, consider some of the nuances. It takes a tip-top GPU to push frame rates of more than 60 frames per second (fps) at 4K and high detail settings with many modern AAA titles. In practical fact, if you're playing the Cyberpunks and Battlefields of the world, and even if you have a high-end GPU, you can't expect to hit 144fps or even 120fps at 4K and high image-qualitysettings, anyway; even the latest Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 Series silicon is hard pressed to achieve such a feat. Given that, a 60Hz refresh rate won't matter as much.

The 60Hz limit is more of an issue if you're an aficionado of older games, or of less-demanding but highly competitive esports titles (CS: GO, Valorant, Apex Legends) in which maximum frame rates are life-and-death matters. For those kinds of games, an OLED will have you leaving frames on the floor—unless you land one of the new 90Hz or 120Hz models.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Meanwhile, OLED also has different considerations for creative professionals. If your job requires careful use of color matching or accuracy, choose your laptop carefully; different OLED laptop manufacturers make different claims about which color gamuts get full coverage, even with many of the laptops using the same panel. Note that Pantone validation is an aspect of some machines, notably several models from Gigabyte.

If you know how to tune and calibrate displays for professional work, you can adjust the OLED to better results than out-of-the-box settings. Largely, the color coverage and accuracy are good enough for most casual and prosumer use cases.

Beyond the display, for our general laptop buying advice, including what components to look for given your needs and budget, check out our roundup of best overall laptops, as well as our guide to the best gaming laptops.

How Does OLED Affect Laptop Battery Life?

As explained previously, when an OLED screen displays black pixels, those dots are turned completely off. Because of that, the screen should use less power when showing black-dominant images or videos with more black content. This also holds even if the scene or image is not completely black, just dark because the pixels still use less power.

To leverage this OLED trait, we've found that most OLED laptop makers are shipping their systems with Windows Dark Mode turned on, so no more juice than necessary is spent displaying your windows, folders, and the Taskbar. In our reviews of the first bunch of OLED laptops we received at PC Labs, we tested the impact of both OLED screens and Dark mode on battery life.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

As some of the first OLED laptop reviews we published, the Razer Blade 15 and the Dell XPS 15 (7590) contain our testing and information on this topic—but the takeaway is that Dark mode could be the chocolate to OLED's peanut butter. Using it delivered a noticeable improvement in battery life in our tests. OLED does use up more juice displaying white pixels, and even pumping up the brightness to the max in Dark mode has much less of an impact than it does with white screens. Using Dark mode and watching videos with a lot of black or dark scenes could add up to hours of additional battery life. Generally, OLED is a power saver, and this aspect only adds to the potential savings.

It may feel like overkill to think you have to monitor how much black or dark space is being displayed on your screen at any one time, but we wouldn't obsess over it. Generally, with OLED, keeping dark mode on (or switching to it when you're going to be using your system off the charger) should make a difference enough. But you may want to keep that desktop wallpaper dark, too!

What Kinds of OLED Laptops Can I Buy?

For now, the field of laptops with OLED screens is small versus the entirety of available laptops. The relative handful we have tested here is promising, and a little varied, but not as varied as the larger laptop market. OLED options have entered more product lines over the last couple of years or so (OLED-screened Chromebooks are now a thing too), and manufacturers most often reserve OLED panels for their top-end, premium models. Given the price of OLED, and most of the panels so far being tied to 4K native resolutions, this makes sense, but there is a slow but sure proliferation of OLED screens to less expensive laptops, too.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

This leads us to the exact types of OLED laptops we tend to see. OLED screens were initially seen mostly in high-end desktop-replacement laptops with optional OLED screens, as well as powerful gaming machines. We still see many of the former, like the Dell XPS 16 (9640), though they're currently less common in gaming machines. Ultraportables and content creator laptops are the categories in which we see most OLED systems.

These laptops may have you watching 4K streaming videos, looking at photos, and maybe doing some content-creation work, depending on the components. Entry-level discrete graphics are an option in some of these laptops, which ought to enable some light gaming at resolutions below 4K. Since that initial wave of systems, we've seen OLED screens deployed in a wider range of form factors, like the convertible Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8, and even dual-screen systems, like the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i and the Asus Zenbook Duo (UX8406). Everything you're doing benefits from OLED, without many downsides other than the price.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

OLED screens in gaming-specific laptops are more the exception than the norm. They usually appear as an add-on option, but more recently manufacturers have opted for super-high-refresh displays over OLED for gaming laptops. If you do still see the option offered in a gaming laptop you're considering, you may have to choose between OLED or high refresh, or at least limit the refresh rate ceiling to acquire an OLED screen (though only more competitive multiplayer gamers are likely to care). Our favorites like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 combine all of these features.

The type of specialty laptops likely to include OLED screens are increasingly not gaming machines, but creator laptops. Aimed at creative professionals, these help users enhance their video editing, color-matching work, and the like. It's not exactly essential for these users, but the gains are clear, and the downside of a limited refresh rate does not apply.

Ready to Buy the Right OLED Laptop for You?

The main, clear upside to OLED screens is how stellar they look. That alone may well be worth the money to you—though, as we've explained, OLED poses clear costs in dollars and more abstract ones. These panels are not for everyone, and paying well into four figures for a laptop with one is an investment.

It will be a while until OLEDs make it into a wider range of laptops and the cost comes way down, but for now, they're a joy to behold and we're glad they're here. If your budget can swing it, check out our recommendations and our spec breakout for the top OLED-bearing laptops that PC Labs has tested.