If you want a laptop that gives you an excellent viewing experience, an OLED panel is the best way to go about it. You get excellent color reproduction and image fidelity, and is akin to some of the best OLED TVs out there, even at lower resolutions. That said, OLED laptops can be a bit expensive, but there are some solid deals you can take advantage of to help bring the price down a bit.
How does an OLED panel achieve this goodness? A quick primer: The pixels in an OLED display can be completely turned off, which means the panel can produce absolute blacks and contrast ratios superior to an LCD screen (where the liquid crystal can only block some of the light). Even an LCD with local dimming can’t match an OLED’s ability to turn individual pixels on and off. OLED displays also offer a wide color range because primary colors can hit higher saturations that let the display produce more colors. Higher saturation levels lead to more vibrant colors, and with more colors on its palette, an OLED panel can create colors that are more accurate.
Another advantage? OLED displays feature thinner layers than LCD displays and don’t require a backlight, which allows for thinner and lighter laptop designs.
Read more: Best Laptop Deals at Amazon, Best Buy and Newegg
You might reasonably think that an OLED is more energy-efficient than an LCD because it doesn’t need to power a backlight and can turn individual pixels completely off. We have found, however, that OLED displays tend to have a negative impact on battery life. They do offer decent battery life; you just can’t expect to get a longer runtime from an OLED laptop in addition to the higher image quality.
With a basic understanding of the advantages of an OLED laptop, let’s take a look at the best deals right now. I’ve included mainstream laptops that have approachable prices, along with high-powered laptops that are currently selling at a discount — and a Chromebook. Yes, you can get an inexpensive Chromebook with an OLED display. The prices and discounts are valid at the time of this writing, and I’ll update this story as sales expire and new deals emerge.
This Asus VivoBook is sleek, compact and comes equipped with a stunning display and a powerful processor. The 15.6-inch OLED screen has full HD 1,920×1,080-pixel resolution. The laptop is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB solid-state drive. This is one of the lowest-cost OLED laptops you’ll encounter and provides sufficient RAM and storage space while also featuring a powerful Ryzen 7 CPU.
This Asus 15.6-inch is a solid option if you want a budget-friendly OLED laptop, and it even has its own graphics card under the hood. With an RTX 3050, you’ll be able to do some basic and indie gaming on it, while the 1920 x 1080 resolution screen is pretty great to game on or watch shows. You also get a very reasonable 16GB DDR5 of RAM and 512GB of storage.
The Yoga 9i 2-in-1 is a small laptop with a lot of power behind it, given the Intel Core i7-1360P, which is a mid-to-high-end processor perfect for productivity and general use. The 14-inch screen runs 2880 x 1800 resolution, and the 16GB of DDR5 is more than enough to have a smooth day-to-day experience. Also, the 512GB should be more than enough for most uses and is perfect.
At $300 off the usual price, this loaded 15-inch Asus ZenBook is a pretty solid value. It’s equipped with a 15.6-inch full HD OLED touchscreen that’s powered by a powerful AMD-Nvidia combo — an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU. This configuration boasts 16GB of RAM and a substantial 1TB of storage. The CPU may be two generations behind AMD’s current crop of chips, but it should still be plenty powerful for content creators and some casual gaming alongside the RTX 3050 Ti graphics.
We named the 16-inch Spectre x36 the best two-in-one laptop for creatives in 2023. The updated 2023 model features a 13th-gen Intel Core i7 Evo processor, along with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for serious storage. It has a 13.5-inch 3K2K OLED touchscreen display, and it folds completely flat, so it doubles as a tablet as well. It’s a great deal with its $300 discount right now at Best Buy.
Read our HP Spectre x360 14 review.
This configuration of the XPS 15 is a serious contender to your average MacBook. It comes with a very powerful 13th Gen Intel Evo i9 processor, one of the best on the market, as well as an RTX 4060, which is a mid-range GPU. If that wasn’t enough, the 15.6-inch screen runs at a 3,456×2,160 resolution, and Dell even throws in 32GB of DDR5 RAM and 1TB of storage. Overall, this is probably one of the most versatile laptops out there with an OLED panel.
