Gaming laptop displays have come a long way in the past few years. Well, that’s easy to say when you look at the specs we have today. A few years ago, most laptops shipped with basic IPS panels that sometimes stood out for particularly fast refresh rates. Now you’ll typically find mini-LED and OLED options, all with fast refresh rates, low response times, and outstanding HDR.
But how far have laptop displays really come? I tested three laptops from the last three years, all equipped with a mini-LED display, to compare what we have today with what was available just a few years ago. Not much has changed in the numbers, but when it comes to actually using these displays, it’s clear that mini-LED has come a long way in a short time.
Three years of mini-LED laptops
Let’s talk about laptops. All three come from Asus: 2024 Scar 18, 2023 Scar 16 and 2022 Flow X16. They come in different sizes and have very different specs, but performance isn’t what’s important here. Importantly, all three laptops come with a 1600p mini-LED display and all fall under the Asus ROG Nebula HDR brand. They all look great, and if you don’t have them side by side to compare, you’ll probably stop there.
At first glance, the 2022 Flow X16 is actually the most impressive, mostly due to the fact that it’s the only display with a glossy finish. The lack of matte finish makes it I feel it as if there is more brightness and contrast. But that feeling ends once you see real content. Playing back some HDR demos, the 2024 Scar 18 not only looked much brighter, but colors looked much more vibrant. You don’t need to do any tests to see this difference with the naked eye.
In terms of specs, there’s really only one thing that makes this difference: dimming zones. With mini-LED, the idea is that you can cram in more LED areas to locally control the brightness, getting closer to what you see on panel technologies like OLED. The more zones the better, giving you more granular brightness control across the entire display. From a high level, the number of zones is the most significant jump we’ve seen in mini-LED gaming laptops in the last three years.
The number of zones matters, but not the way you think.
The 2022 Flow X16 has 512 zones, while the 2023 Scar 16 doubles that to 1024 zones. 2024 Scar 18 is even higher with 2304 zones. If you go and look up what the local dimming zones are doing, you’ll probably see that the “blooming” problem is what more zones can help overcome. Each lighting area covers a certain number of pixels, and if something doesn’t fit neatly within those boundaries, you’ll see some light spilling where it shouldn’t – this is also known as blooming. A higher number of zones minimizes this effect so that you (hopefully) don’t notice it. In theory it is.
But as I found out in my testing, that conventional wisdom didn’t pan out the way I expected. It’s not that the number of zones doesn’t matter — it’s that the result of “more zones” resulted in a far different end effect than I would have guessed. Bloom is simply not an issue here, proving once again how a linear, spec-focused mindset can mislead purchasing decisions.
By the numbers
Why is there no blooming effect? I expected to see a gradual improvement in the lack of bloom, but like so many numbers in the specs, this progression is not that simple. As it turns out, with such small screens and such a large number of home zones, all three displays already handle the problem really well. It’s very hard to spot bloom between the three displays, even side by side. In a blind test it would be completely impossible to tell the difference.
So while blooming wasn’t an issue, increasing the dimming areas created a tangible, visible increase in HDR performance. The three displays handled brightness in very different ways, again due to the drastic difference in the number of zones. The 2022 Flow X16 seemed to hit a certain wall where, in order to preserve some semblance of color, the brightness dropped. The screen didn’t dim at all, but it felt like it.
Let me give an example. I took an HDR web page with a YouTube video and dragged the mouse cursor from the white YouTube page to a black video and the cursor went from perfect white to a slightly muted gray. With the number of zones and the overall lower brightness, it looked like the 2022 display was limiting the brightness output in a high-contrast scenario to reduce the blooming effect.
This effect disappeared on the 2023 display as well as the 2024 display. With all three displays, the biggest thing I noticed was how the color balance and brightness interacted. Both the 2022 and 2023 models felt like they hit that wall, turning white to gray and limiting display output to support color. The 2024 model didn’t, as it offered blazing brightness regardless of what content was on screen.
Interestingly, this difference in how the displays handle brightness and color doesn’t always show up in objective testing. In terms of color coverage, they are almost even. The 2022 and 2023 displays hit 100% of DCI-P3 and 90% and 89% of AdobeRGB, respectively, while the 2024 model hit 99% of DCI-P3 and 89% of AdobeRGB. Color accuracy was also very similar. The 2022 model is clocked at 1.2, the 2023 model is clocked at 1.1, and the 2024 model is also clocked at 1.2.
That didn’t surprise me. What was really shocking was how close the brightness was. In HDR for a 1% window, the 2022 model managed 1024 nits, the 2023 model managed 936 nits, and the 2024 model reached 1178 nits. Granted, the 2024 model is the brightest, but the brightness level I saw looking at the displays certainly seemed much higher than the difference of around 150 nits.
In objective terms, these three displays are not that different. They have nearly identical color coverage and accuracy, and very similar brightness and contrast scores. However, the experience couldn’t be more different, which is so instructive when comparing these displays side-by-side. Nowhere was this more evident than when comparing how the screens handled gaming.
Change in experience
I played the same scene Cyberpunk 2077, and initially adjusted all three to identical HDR settings. However, this resulted in some very “off” visuals, so I went to tweak the HDR settings until each display looked good to give each a fair shake.
As I mentioned, I immediately noticed the lack of bloom on all three displays. But in very complex scenes, this number of zones really started to make a difference.
Between the 2023 model (right) and the 2024 model (left), you can see how the corner shrouded in shadow is much darker on the 2024 model. According to the numbers, all three displays can maintain stable black levels, but the higher number of zones of 2024 allows the display to transition to lower brightness areas much more gracefully.
This is a similar story with highlights. You can see the fire reflected across the street in the photo above, but the 2024 model has much more depth. Again, these are the areas of work. More localized brightness control allows for much greater accuracy when dealing with very complex lighting situations. The overall contrast of these displays is similar, but these smaller regions of localized contrast couldn’t be more different.
Once again, 2024 was also brighter. The readings are similar when looking at peak brightness for a static window, but the 2024 can handle very bright and very dark areas in close proximity much better. In grainy scenes, the 2023 and 2022 models seem to limit overall brightness to reduce the effect of blooming, making brightness less impressive and colors less vibrant.
It’s easy to look at the innovations in mini-LEDs over the past few years and assume that something like a bloom is the improvement. The higher number of zones is the critical factor in the improvement of these displays, but this number does not explain the difference in the actual use of the displays. By putting them side by side, you can see how far mini-LED has come — and, regardless of what the objective metrics say, how the visuals have improved as a result.
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