Lenovo finally offers a better 120 Hz display for the affordable ThinkPad E14

Inexpensive office laptops are traditionally equipped with pretty bad screens and not long ago, there were still VA panels available. Right now, the standard for affordable office notebooks are IPS screens with a brightness around 300 nits, 60 Hz and low color gamut. This choice makes sense for companies who want to save money and considering the growing number of flexible workplaces, laptops are often connected to larger external screens anyway. The quality of the internal screen is therefore not as important. 

Expensive business laptops are often available with OLED panels, and even there there are obvious advantages, IPS panels simply have no problem with PWM flickering and matte panels do not have issues with reflections, either. Lenovo now starts offering better IPS screens for the affordable ThinkPad E-series. Both the ThinkPad E16 G3 as well as the ThinkPad E14 G7 can be equipped with high-resolution IPS panel with 120 Hz and full sRGB color gamut for an additional charge of just 60 Euros.

Quite interestingly, the smaller ThinkPad E14 G7 even gets a slightly higher resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels (16:10), but it suffers from a slightly grainy picture impression on bright surfaces. The larger 16-inch screen of the ThinkPad E16 G3 with 2560 x 1600 pixels performs better in this respect. Still, the image quality is unquestionably better compared to the default screen. The higher refresh rate in particular is a big improvement and you can even edit images on the optional screens.

Please see our review of the new ThinkPad E14 G7 for more information.