Are there any laptops screens that meet your standards?

There's more to image quality than simply black level/contrast ratio. Colour accuracy, viewing angle, motion handling etc. are all important.
If you want the best notebook display, you'll buy one of the new Retina MacBook Pros.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review/4

You won't get a Blu-ray drive in one of them though.

The need for a physical removable disc playback is so 20th century, when there is plenty of storage to load your BRs for the trip.

Check out HP EliteBooks with optional DreamColor IPS displays.

Oh you have a need to take your ENTIRE COLLECTION on the road. Never mind my suggestion then.


By all means don't sell bootleg copies on eBay, Mother Teresa.


If u start saying can't do this, and can't do that... sounds to me you already placed lots of limitations on yourself.

I have yet to see a Laptop display that even close close to something watchable or usable for photo editing.

There are IPS Laptops??

Who cares.
DILLIGAF

I'm pretty sure Dell (M4600), Sony (Vaio S - 15.5" only) and Lenovo (X230 - no optical drive) also have IPS display options. Since you are an Asus fan, the new, upcoming Zenbooks will have IPS displays. I'm not sure when the release date is or whether they have built-in optical drives though.

http://ultrabooknews.com/2012/06/14/zenbook-prime-1080p-ips-display-bests-macbook-pro-1800p-display-in-contrast-ratio/

Sounds pretty good. Mind you, I think it's only a matter of time until someone releases an oled notebook ( if you don't mind waiting).
Edited by Mikazaru - 6/27/12 at 11:59am

Higher contrast ≠ better quality. To begin with, the Zenbook Prime display is only 165 PPI compared to the MacBook Pro's 220 PPI, which is a significant difference, especially when Windows is not at all optimised for resolution scaling like OS X is. There are 125 and 150% font size options, but they completely break a lot of applications. The main thing that seems to make it higher contrast is that it's brigher.

You're going to find it harder and harder to buy notebooks with a Blu-ray drive in them these days. Other than watching Blu-ray films, there's basically no reason for a PC to have an optical drive in 2012, and that space can either be used to significantly improve battery life, or significantly slim down the form-factor of the machine.

You're far better off buying a portable drive, ripping a couple of films for your trip, and leaving the drive at home. As others have said, do you really need to take a big stack of films with you?
There have always been one or two ThinkPads with IPS screens in the past, and HP used them with their DreamColor laptops, but that's about it. Apple's push towards using IPS displays, first with the iPhone, then the iMacs, the iPads and now the MacBook Pros seems to have brought about a resurgence in the popularity of IPS displays on notebooks, with many vendors (such as ASUS) implementing high resolution IPS displays in anticipation of the Retina MacBook announcements. It looks like they were expecting the MacBook Airs to get Retina displays first, rather than the MacBook Pro, as it seems to mostly be ultrabooks that have been getting them.
The difference in black levels between modern IPS panels is minimal at best, and many notebook displays are very poorly calibrated. (something Apple does a great job with)
Home Theater being the operative phrase here. Watching films on my laptop or my iPad is not a priority, and for the few times where it might be a possibility, I'm going to rip them so I don't need to carry any discs around or kill the battery life.

Portability and battery life are significantly more important to me than having an optical drive. I've been saying that Apple and other vendors should be ditching them for years now. (in real notebooks, rather than low-voltage ultrabooks) Resolution and quality of the display are far more important for getting work done (video & image editing) than having a Blu-ray drive.


Anyway, if you don't care enough about the display quality to buy a Retina MacBook Pro, one of HP's DreamColor notebooks with a Blu-ray drive is your best option.

I know Samsung developed their own version of IPS for their monitors, PLS. I don't know/wonder if it'll find its way into their laptop displays.

Aside from casually browsing on a Macbook, I've never tried to watch dark or mixed-contrast content on a laptop display, but traditionally IPS panels have less contrast and poorer black levels compared to other panel types, eg. VA panels. They tend to have better color reproduction and better viewing angles than other panel types, but if you're looking for deep blacks and tons of contrast I don't know if IPS will cut it.

I'm not really up on monitor/laptop display tech, but I recently bought a cheaper LG IPS (IPS236) monitor for my desktop, and it looks great and very natural for viewing photos, etc. but I don't watch films on it. I tested it out when I first got it with some letterboxed content and the black bars were light purplish-gray, not black in the least. I'm happy with it but would probably use something else if I planned on watching movies on it. I have a three year old Asus U81 laptop and it probably uses some kind of cheap TN panel - has good contrast if I'm looking at it "right" but if I move off-axis at all it looks like absolute garbage.

Whatever panel my Sharp LE700 LCD TV uses looks better than either PC display to me. It was advertised as an "X-Gen" panel, and I'm pretty sure it was an ASV panel, and they started using UV2A panels in later model years. I don't think Sharp makes laptop displays, but their panels seem to have a really good native contrast, although color looks a little less natural than my IPS monitor.

If you look, you will be able to find sources on this, but PLS is nowhere near as good as IPS. Just like so many other Samsung technologies, it sounds good on paper, but doesn't live up to it in the real world.
On laptops, the vast majority of displays are basically 1,000:1 or less. While IPS panels top out around that, it means they're actually among the higher contrast laptop displays, rather than being some of the lowest contrast displays when you start looking at monitors or televisions.
This is why I would only ever recommend IPS in a laptop, or monitor. (well maybe you want a TN monitor if you need a 120Hz low-latency gaming screen)
Both ASV and UV2A are VA panel types. ASV was reasonably good contrast, and I believe UV2A panels are still the highest contrast panels on the market today. Being VA panel types though, the viewing angles are poor, and response times are uneven. Again, for any kind of portable device, or a monitor, you want IPS.

Frankly, I'd want IPS in a television if they managed to improve the contrast. Being stuck around 1,000:1 when Sharp's UV2A panels are 5,000:1 is quite a difference.

Great post! thanks for the information.

Going a little more off topic here, I think IPS would be a great solution for home theater displays considering its strengths if they just fix the contrast issue. You;d figure it could be addressed by full-array backlighting with local dimming, but apparently not according to the lackluster reviews of this year's LM9600. Come to think of it, their full array models haven't seemed to garner much praise in the last couple of years, eg. the LW9800 and the LX9500.

I think some facts are not know about IPS panels. There are different versions of IPS panels on notebooks. There is the traditional IPS panel with wide viewing angles but that are still WLED and about 72% color gamut and then there are the IPS RGB panels with over 100% of the Adobe color gamut and supporting 1 billion colors. The Dell Precision M4600 & M6600 and the HP Elitebook 8560w & 8760w both have the IPS RGB panels. These are the only notebooks currently on the market today with 100% color gamut. I think they have new systems coming out with the same panels again. All of the others are regular IPS panels. The Apple Macbook with the Retina display is only 72% color gamut. Yes it has a very high resolution but the color is not even close to the Dell and HP systems.
If there are other notebooks out there with IPS RGB panels it would be nice to know as IPS is nice but it is NOT the same as IPS RGB technology.

Sager and the Clevo companies make laptops with 90 to 95 percent gamut. Such a screen is a $95 upgrade, but it is an option for those who want a nice display in a laptop. 

IPS panels don't have nearly enough contrast to mask the "haloing" problems inherent to a full array local-dimming LED backlight system. This is why the Sony HX900 and Sharp Elites are the best local-dimming LCDs available to date by far, due to the use of high contrast UV2A panels.

And regardless of panel type, viewing angles are always going to be significantly compromised when using a local-dimming backlight system.
You are describing differences in backlighting (White LEDs vs RGB LEDs) not panel types. (though there are many IPS panel types)

Furthermore, it is detrimental to video quality, to exceed the sRGB/BT.709 gamut, and the MacBook displays have all been close to sRGB in recent years.

Matching or exceeding the Adobe RGB gamut is great for photographers or anyone doing print work where the output medium can exceed sRGB/BT.709, but not for video or the majority of other computer tasks.