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 athorough 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.

I was an ardent reader of Notebookcheck’s laptop reviews even back in school. After writing reviews as a hobby, I then joined Notebookcheck in 2016 and have worked on device reviews and news articles ever since then. My personal interest lies more with laptops than smartphones, with business laptops being the most interesting category for me. Technology should make our lives and work easier and good laptops are an essential tool for that to happen. This is why laptop reviews are not just my work but are also my passion.

Translator: Jacob Fisher – Translator – 139 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2022

Growing up in regional Australia, I first became acquainted with computers in my early teens after a broken leg from a football (soccer) match temporarily condemned me to a predominately indoor lifestyle. Soon afterwards I was building my own systems. Now I live in Germany, having moved here in 2014, where I study philosophy and anthropology. I am particularly fascinated by how computer technology has fundamentally and dramatically reshaped human culture, and how it continues to do so.