Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon G10 OLED: Trading image quality for battery life

Image quality and battery life - two characteristics that do not have much to do with each other at first glance, but are closely connected upon closer examination, at least in laptops. A higher resolution? Higher consumption. OLED technology? Higher consumption.

Consequently, buyers are often faced with a choice: Do I take the best display and be more desk-bound? Or do I settle for slightly inferior screen quality and have a much more enduring notebook in return?

A very good example is the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10. We reviewed this in the summer with a Full HD display that uses IPS technology and is also advertised with the "Low Power" label. This model achieved around ten hours in our Wi-Fi test, a respectable battery life suitable for everyday use. In return, it has a display with mediocre response times that remained below the brightness mark of 400 cd/m².

The situation is completely different in the model that we recently subjected to a thorough review: The OLED display of this X1 Carbon G10 has a higher resolution at 2.8K (2,880 x 1,800) and plays in a completely different league in terms of quality than the Full HD panel. However, battery life is poor: At only five hours, this has been halved.

OLED offers at least one way to extend the battery life: If the web browser it set to dark mode, the battery life is extended to seven hours. This is because the OLED pixels are self-illuminating and the darker the displayed content, the less energy the panel consumes.

Nevertheless, the bottom line is: Display quality or battery life - if you maximize one of the two qualities, the other suffers.