I'll Never Buy A 4K Laptop And You Shouldn't Either — Here's Why

I professionally review laptops, but also desktops, monitors, tablets, and sometimes gadgets. That means I spend most of my day looking at monitors and wondering if they're worth the price I'm paying for them.

I've been doing this for years and have seen laptop technology improve faster than I thought. The last laptop I bought was an eight year old Dell XPS 13 and I remember the 1080p panel hurting my eyes. But when I plug it in (the battery's dead) and place it next to my new Dell XPS 13 Plus (2023) with a 3.5K OLED screen, the poor old XPS 2015 looks like a kid's tablet.

If you compare a modern laptop with a large LCD screen to a competing OLED one, I think you'll notice a noticeable difference in picture quality between the two. I've become a big fan of OLED screens because, at least in my opinion, they look really nice. The fact that blacks on an OLED screen are true blacks (meaning the pixels are completely off and don't show any backlit blacks) results in sharper contrast and brighter colors because they stand out better against the deep, dark blacks you'll receive. OLED screen.

But even though I'm a huge OLED fan (well, I spent the money after all the employees told me about the new LG C2 OLED TV), I'm much less excited about the introduction of 4K displays on laptops. We saw the first laptops with 4K screens hit the market years ago, but now that the technology has matured, there's everything from a thin and ultra-portable 13-inch laptop to a massive 17-inch gaming laptop with a 4K screen.

But after testing dozens of laptops with a wide range of resolutions and screen sizes over the past few years, I've realized that 4K is often a waste of money for laptops. In fact, I think it could be worse for your health and productivity than a cheap, low-quality display.

for this reason.

You are paying for the opportunity to cheat.

The advantage of 4K over lower resolution is clear: you get more pixels on the screen, so in theory you see a more detailed picture. A true 4K screen has a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels, which is four times the number of pixels offered by a standard 1920 x 1080 (hence 1080p) screen.

And after spending many hours in front of the TV, I can tell you that the difference is very clear on the big screen and it is worth expanding on it. Watching a movie or game in 4K vs 1080p makes a huge difference in picture quality when the screen width is 40-60 inches. So, if you're still using a standard HDTV, I recommend upgrading. 4K TV If given the chance, your eyes will thank you.

When I unpacked the tiny 13-inch Dell XPS 13 Plus and saw its 3.5K screen for the first time, I was blown away by how small everything was.

However, when your 4K screen is a 13-inch laptop screen, it's hard to appreciate all 3840 x 2160 pixels. I know from experience that I've finished reviewing the Dell XPS 13 Plus with a 3.5K OLED screen and can't read anything without zooming in on it.

Well, this is not an insurmountable problem. Windows 11 has some great built-in tools for adjusting settings like text size, screen resolution, etc., so you can always lower the resolution of your laptop or increase the size of objects on the screen. I often do this on small laptops with resolutions higher than 1080p where Windows 11 scales down to 125% or 150% because text can be 1440px (2560 x 1440px) or 1600px (2560 x 1440px) . 1600 pixels).

But when I opened up the tiny 13-inch XPS 13 Plus and saw its 3.5K screen for the first time, I was blown away by how small everything was. I had to lean a few inches toward the laptop to get a good look and access the Windows display settings, and when I turned the scale on it zoomed in by up to 300% .

I actually laughed out loud because, up until now, those high zoom settings always seemed to be for the visually impaired. But I pretty much bumped it up to 300% and the laptop was usable again.

You probably won't be using true 4K anyway.

After dialing the number, I sat back in my chair and scrolled through the information, relieved to have been freed from the agony of searching and the awkwardness of using a laptop.

But I still had to deal with all the weird use cases that come up when working with proportional resolution, like text itself formatting weirdly or being unreadable due to wrong scaling. To use the 3.5K XPS 13 Plus as my workstation, I had to use the calibration tools built into Windows and calibrate my Chrome browser. So it's possible, but it's kind of annoying.

Keep in mind that this is just a 3.5k screen on a 13" laptop. I've never seen or used a true 4K monitor on a 13-inch screen, but it's probably more difficult to use.

And you pay more and do those extra steps for... what? So, can you watch movies or play games in 4K on your laptop?

You can't play your favorite games in 4K at decent frame rates without the best gaming laptop. And while you can stream some TV shows and movies in 4K, I doubt you'll be able to see much detail on a small laptop screen, especially if you're streaming over Wi-Fi and have the best picture quality to begin with.

4K displays also tend to use more power than their lower resolution counterparts. So if you move to 4K and it becomes less portable, you'll lose battery life without real gains. This appears to be the case with the Dell XPS 13 Plus (2023), which offers up to 9 hours of battery life at a 1200p touch resolution, but only 7 hours when upgrading to a 4K screen. And it didn't last long, averaging 6 hours and 20 minutes in our battery tests.

I'm not saying 4K screens are bad for all laptops. For example, if I were spending money on a 4K screen to buy a large 18-inch gaming laptop, it would be easier for me to estimate the cost (and benefit). Although you still have to raise it up a bit, the extra inches can make a huge difference in how far your eyes can see a 4K screen. And you don't have to worry about running out of battery since this big slot machine has to be plugged in anyway.

To be honest, I don't think you can find an 18-inch laptop with 4K resolution these days. Most of the models I've seen or tested offer a resolution of 1600p, which is more than enough for any size laptop. Even if you're planning on buying a laptop with a big screen and 4K sounds like a good idea, I'd advise against upgrading to 4K.

Spend the money on an OLED screen instead, or upgrade something important inside (like the RAM or processor). I doubt you will miss the extra pixels and potentially avoid serious back and neck pain in the future.

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