Benchmarks: Display
Some of the biggest advancements in modern laptops revolve around the capabilities of the display panel. To provide a more meaningful overview of panel characteristics, we're deploying Datacolor's Spyder 4 Elite professional monitor analyser to return a quantitative assessment of display quality.
We suspect the optional QHD+ touchscreen will offer superior visuals in most departments, yet the FHD panel included in the base specification is no bad choice. It manages 98 per cent of the sRGB space and 78 per cent of the Adobe RGB.
Being able to display a wide gamut of colours is helpful, yet the colours themselves still need to deliver in terms of accuracy. In the above chart, the Delta-E figure corresponds to how close the displayed colours match up with real life and the lower the overall result, the better. An overall score of 1.20 is well above average and comparable to a good-quality desktop display.
One area in which there is room for improvement, however, is brightness, which on our review machine peaked at 249 nits. A sub-300 score would typically translate to poor outdoor visibility, yet that isn't necessarily the case as the Latitude's anti-reflective finish does such a good job of minimising glare and reflections. Better still, black levels are excellent, and contrast is among the best we've seen on a laptop screen of this size.
All things considered, the FHD panel is very enjoyable and unless you need touchscreen functionality, the optional QHD+ upgrade isn't a must-have.
