msi lcd panel testing brands

Based in South Korea, Samsung has become one of the world"s leading electronic brands, and its main competitor is LG. Their lineup includes some monitors with IPS panels, but many have VA panels with a curved screen. Although VA panels look great in dark rooms, the main downside is that they have narrow viewing angles, which isn"t ideal for sharing your screen with others. They"ve even started including Mini LED backlighting on high-end models, further improving the picture quality, peak brightness, and dark room performance. It helps that Samsung already produces TVs with this Mini LED technology, so they"ve become an industry leader for monitors with it.

Current LiveChat Service is applying with certain countries only. If the region which is excluding from list, please contact us by the Online Customer Service Web Ticket https://account.msi.com/tickets. We will reply to you as soon as possible.

While most of the MSI laptop range offer display choices, the MSI Titan GT77 12UHS is only available at retail with a 3840x2160 120 Hz UHD panel. This itself would typically be unremarkable, however underscoring the engineering sample nature of the laptop that Intel sent over, our test unit is equipped with an entirely different panel: a 1920x1080 360 Hz display, seemingly the same one used in the Raider GE76. As a result the display in our evaluation unit isn"t the display you"ll find at retail.

Every so often we get discrepencies like this with engineering sample hardware, and in most cases it"s due to a last-minute change in plans for retail hardware. In this case, we suspect that between assembling their engineering samples and retail hardware, MSI opted to axe the 1080p/360Hz version of the laptop and only offer a 4K/120Hz version. This, if nothing else, underscores how swiftly the laptop market can move, especially for low volume hardware like desktop-class laptops.

We have seen 360Hz displays on other high-end laptops (including the aforementioned Raider), as the lower resolution panels are a favorite of eSports gamers. But the UHD option makes more sense in the flagship model for most people, and the RTX 3080L Ti is really one of the few graphics options that allows this to work on a gaming notebook.

In any case, along with their obvious focus in high-performance designs, MSI is also one of the few companies to focus on display accuracy. To that end. they include a great utility called MSI True Color which lets you set the display color to several different modes, as well as customize the gamma, color, and more.

Unfortunately, there is a bug in our engineering sample with the latest Intel graphics driver and True Color which causes the gamma to get completely messed up. When you launch True Color, it lets you know about this, and how to reinstall the older driver. The incorrect gamma settings cause the screen to become washed out. This appears to be an issue across a wide range of devices, so if this happens to you MSI has a support article here:

To test display accuracy we use Portrait Display’s Calman software suite with a custom workflow. For brightness and contrast readings, the X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter is used. For color accuracy testing, the X-Rite i1Pro2 spectrophotometer is connected.

The contrast ratio of 1077:1 is just average for the category. The Raider GE76 we tested was a bit better and has the same 17-inch 360 Hz display, but that one didn’t get as bright, so perhaps it is a bit of panel lottery.

As this particular configuration of Titan GT77, in particular the display choice, will not be available at retail, this is not a representitive result and certainly not in-line with what we normally see from MSI laptops. It was a good chance to see how well the True Color software calibration worked, and it worked pretty much as expected. It helps, but it certainly is not able to replicate a professional calibration suite like the Calman suite we use.

Over the past several years, we"ve seen tens if not hundreds of "creator" laptops crop up on the market. If you want to appeal to digital artists and creatives of all stripes, just slap an NVIDIA GPU inside, use a panel that covers at least 100% sRGB, make sure there"s an SD card slot, and you can call it a "creator" laptop.

Fortunately, the MSI Creator 17 that we"re looking at today is one of those laptops. It combines some of the most powerful hardware on the market with tons of connectivity and a gorgeous 4K HDR miniLED display – a first for anylaptop when it was originally announced.

Beyond that, each of these computers can sport up to an Intel Core i9-11900H CPU, up to 64GB of 3200MHz DDR4 RAM, and two M.2 NVMe SSDs (one PCIe 3.0, one PCIe 4.0). Finally, all three models can be configured with one of two displays: a photo- and gaming-friendly 120Hz 4K IPS panel that claims 100% coverage of Adobe RGB, or an HDR- and video-editor friendly 60Hz 4K miniLED display that claims 100% coverage of DCI-P3.

The build we"re testing is pretty much the most expensive configuration of the Creator 17 that you can actually find available: with a Core i9-11900H, NVIDIA RTX 3080, 32GB of DDR4-3200, 2TB of PCIe 4.0 M.2 storage, and a price tag of $3,800.

The MSI Creator 17 is a bit of a tank. Partly because of its size, but also because of its build quality and miniLED display, this is neither a light nor portable device. The bezels around the 17.3-inch display are tiny, measuring just 1/4 of an inch, but the overall weight and dimensions are still quite large: the laptop is 15.6 inches x 10.2 inches (39.6cm x 25.9cm) and it weighs in at just over 5.4 lbs (2.4kg).

In addition to the large high-quality display, the Creator 17"s large chassis allowed MSI to include a bunch of ports that have all-but disappeared from many of this laptop"s competitors. This is the kind of port selection we expectwhen we review a 17-inch laptop, but that"s not always what we get.

Excellent port selection aside, the rest of MSI"s design choices were a bit more "hit-or-miss" for me. The keyboard is solid, but the keycaps are a bit smaller than I"m used to and they take a more travel than most of the low-profile keyboards that I"ve used. This makes for a slightly "mushy" feeling that translates into a slower typing experience for me personally.

Speaking of the trackpad, I could have done with something a bit larger. For the sake of cooling, MSI put a big grill at the top of the device, but this forces the keyboard deck downwards and crushes the trackpad into a long and skinny orientation. The result is a touch surface that"s about twice as wide as it is tall, so while you can comfortably move from one side of the screen to the other without lifting your finger, you can only get about 2/3 of the way up the screen before you run out of trackpad.

After removing the back panel and the battery, one of the ribbon cables coming off the motherboard simply wouldn"t budge – the little metal bracket holding it in place refused to flip up and release the cable. Any more pressure might have snapped the bracket, torn the cable, or otherwise left me holding the bill for a $3,800 loaner PC.

One of the main reasons we wanted to review the MSI Creator 17 is that it was the first laptop with a miniLED display. Long before Apple announced the new MacBook Pros, MSI unveiled this bad boy with a factory calibrated display that claims a maximum sustained brightness of 1000 nits, 100% coverage of DCI-P3, an average Delta E of less than 2, and full-array local dimming for enhanced contrast.

At a glance, the colors coming from our MSI Creator 17 were already quite good out of the box thanks to the factory calibration, but we did end up re-calibrating the display to get the best possible results. When I first powered on the computer, MSI"s "True Color" app automatically set the display to the AdobeRGB color mode. I"m not sure how it decides this – especially since this panel is better suited for DCI- or Display-P3 – but that was the default setting for me.

To get the widest possible gamut out of the display, you need to open up MSI True Color, select the Customize tab, and choose the "Native" color space:

We tried both, and were pleasantly surprised by the built-in calibration system. According to MSI, this does not constitute proper hardware calibration – there"s no hardware LUT sitting on a chip between your display and the graphics card, it"s all being handled in software – but the MSI True Color app will automatically set your white point to D65, generate a new Native profile, and create a bunch of color space presets without you ever having to touch a slider.

As it happens, the system works well. In fact, the results from the self-calibration using MSI"s built-in tool were actually better than what we achieved manually.

After adjusting the red, green, and blue gains manually in MSI True Color, things get much better. The display"s white point is now almost right on D65: with a color temperature of ~6500K and balanced RGB primaries. For our panel, this required adjusting the RGB primaries by -5, -6, and -3, respectively:

It"s nice to have this kind of control over your RGB gains, even in software. But the real surprise came when we reset all of the color settings and used the MSI True Color calibration tool instead of doing it manually.

These are some of the best results we"ve seen from any laptop display, and the fact that MSI"s built-in app can do all the work for you is a nice bonus.

In our tests, the MSI Creator 17 has slightly worse gamut coverage but superior color accuracy. Allowing for a bit of variation from measurement to measurement and panel to panel, I"d say these these two displays are basically identical, putting the MSI Creator 17 on par with one of the best laptop displays on the market.

Most high-end laptops with "HDR capable" displays have no business putting HDR on the box. With no full-array local dimming, most of the LCD displays in modern laptops can"t generate the contrast required for true HDR. On the other end of the spectrum, OLED displays have perfect contrast, but they simply can"t get bright enough. They may be able to hit 500 nits or higher on a 10% patch, but that number drops to 200 nits or less for full screen white.

The MSI Creator 17 is one of the very few laptop displays on the market that is truly HDR capable. With an advertised full screen brightness of 1000 nits and a measured peak brightness of ~1150 nits in our tests, it can definitely get bright enough. And thanks to the excellent native color gamut and 240 local dimming zones, it can produce the saturated colors and contrast you need to view or edit HDR content.

We loaded up the same HDR blooming test on the MSI Creator 17 (left) and the M1 Max MacBook Pro (right) and photographed the results in a darkened room.

MSI deserves praise for being the first manufacturer to put a proper miniLED display inside a laptop. Their attempt pre-dates Apple, and the Creator 17 is still one of the few HDR laptops you can actually use for HDR editing. We just know that better is possible.

The specs I just mentioned are some of the best you can get inside a PC laptop, and having such a large and well-cooled chassis means that MSI is trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out the CPU, GPU, and RAM inside this machine. Whether you"re editing in Lightroom Classic, Capture One Pro, Photoshop, or Premiere Pro, you can expect this laptop to chew through your workflow as fast or faster than any of its immediate competitors in the PC space.

Lightroom import is pretty much a CPU-bound task, so we expected the MSI Creator 17"s Core i9 to best the Dell XPS 17"s Core i7 and either match or outperform the M1 Max MacBook Pro. That is more or less what happened:

In both tests, the MSI Creator 17 is extremely quick, hampered only by the fact that Adobe doesn"t use GPU acceleration to speed up either imports or exports. If it did, the XPS 17 would have a much harder time keeping up.

Because Capture One uses the GPU to accelerate both imports and exports, the MSI Creator 17 makes up some serious ground on the MacBook Pro and outperforms the Dell XPS 17 in every test. This is where the NVIDIA RTX 3080 GPU can flex its combination of additional CUDA cores and VRAM.

The MSI Creator 17 is one of the first PCs we"ve tested that breaks the 1000 mark overall, and the GPU score of 116.5 is the highest we"ve seen from any computer that we"ve tested thus far. There are a few laptops out there with 140-150W RTX 3080 GPUs that could probably outpace the Creator 17 on this benchmark, but those are even thicker, heavier, and usually targeted at gamers.

This is another application that takes full advantage of the RTX 3080 GPU inside the MSI Creator 17, giving it a leg up over the XPS 17 in every single test.

Performance isn"t everything, and there are definitely faster PC laptops out there, but as of this writing the MSI Creator 17 is undoubtedly one of the fastest "creator" PCs you can buy.

The MSI Creator 17 is a 17-inch creator laptop that"s not afraid to lean in to that identity. It"s big, bulky, and heavy, but it"s also packed with ports, powerful hardware, and one of the best and brightest displays in any laptop currently on the market. It"s a laptop that"s meant to be used plugged in – maybe even docked to an external HDR monitor and wired up to your home network – about 90% of the time. The other 10% is just another one of those trade-offs I mentioned.

The MSI Creator 17 is one of the most powerful creator laptops on the market, and one of the very few that isn"t abusing the term "HDR" for marketing purposes

It"s not a perfect laptop (is there such a thing?) and MSI will no doubt improve on the design in future iterations. The keyboard, trackpad, and especially the RAM accessibility could and should all be improved, and the miniLED display could do with a few more local dimming zone to decrease blooming.

But in the meantime, I can confidently say that the MSI Creator 17 is one of the most powerful creator laptops on the market, and one of the very few that isn"t abusing the term "HDR" for marketing purposes. It"s a proper desktop replacement that"s worthy of that "Creator" title.

Feast for the eyes. Selecting a laptop with a good LCD panel is essential for an enjoyable viewing experience. In this article, we will look into several factors that determine an ideal LCD panel for a laptop, including display size, resolution, refresh rate, and other characteristics that gamers should be looking at for a gaming experience that is both immersive and offers a competitive edge at the same time. We take the implementation of LCD displays in MSI laptops as examples to explain the basics. (Sponsored article.)

Display technology seems to be pretty straightforward at first sight — just decide on the resolution and you"ll be good to go, right? Wrong. A lot of stuff goes on behind the scenes to ensure vivid visuals for an enhanced viewing experience. Modern laptop displays have come a long way and bring increased complexities that need to be properly evaluated to ensure that you"re getting your money"s worth. Factors such as screen size, resolution, refresh rates, response times, color gamut coverage, and panel choice and quality are all variables that can make or mar the viewing experience. That is the reason Notebookcheck tests out each of these parameters in all our laptop reviews.

In this article, we will take a look at how these parameters are factored in while deciding on a laptop display for gamers. We will restrict our discussion to LCD panels since OLED displays are still yet to mature enough to be used as gaming displays. We illustrate some of the concepts by showing examples from MSI gaming notebooks such as the MSI GT76 9SG.

The LCD panel size (measured diagonally) directly influences the laptop"s chassis. The general LCD panel sizes used in MSI laptops include 14, 15.6, and 17.3-inches. Thin and light laptops usually use 14-inch and 15.6-inch screens while desktop replacements can go up to 17.3-inches. A screen size that aids your workflow is very important as is the display resolution, which we will come to shortly. Designers, photo and video editors, and workstation users would do best with larger displays whereas internet surfers and document writers can make do with the smaller ones as well. Gaming and entertainment can also benefit from bigger screen sizes for a more immersive viewing experience.

Refresh rates have a direct impact on the overall viewing experience. Basically, refresh rate denotes the number of times an LCD panel can refresh its image data. A display with a refresh rate of 60 Hz can refresh its on-screen content 60 times a second. Most laptop displays today offer a default 60 Hz refresh rate with some panels even offering up to 144 Hz. Higher refresh rates result in a smooth viewing experience without any perceivable lag in gaming or even while interacting with GUI elements in general.

While 144 Hz is a high-enough refresh rate, this year, MSI"s laptops have upped the ante by offering 240 Hz panels as well. This eliminates any instance of screen tearing and enables competitive gameplay in fast-paced titles where every single frame can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Below is an example of black-to-white and gray-to-gray response time measurements in the MSI GT76 9SG gaming notebook. As you can see, the GT76 has some of the lowest response times, making it an ideal choice for competitive gaming.

The human eye can discern a wide range of colors and shades, but an LCD monitor can only reproduce a limited part of the visible color spectrum. The range of colors that can be reproduced by an LCD display constitutes its color gamut. Support for a wide color gamut means that the LCD panel can deliver more accurate color.

Modern LCD panels usually refer to coverage of a certain color gamut standard to convey to the buyer a sense of what to expect from the display"s color reproduction abilities. Commonly used standards include sRGB, NTSC, and Adobe RGB. We will discuss more about color gamut standards and color accuracy in our upcoming article on laptop LCD displays for content creators.

sRGB is the commonly used color gamut standard across LCD monitors, printers, and most digital cameras. However, the overall color range of sRGB is very limited and does not include highly saturated colors. Adobe RGB overcomes this limitation, and displays supporting this color gamut standard can display a much more vivid color profile, especially when considering the greens. The image below illustrates this nicely.

The choice of LCD panel influences all the factors listed above. Commonly used laptop LCD panels fall into three categories: Twisted Nematic (TN), In-Plane Switching (IPS), and Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide (IGZO) panels. Let"s have a brief look at each of them.

In a typical TN panel, the TN liquid crystal (each crystal molecule corresponds to a pixel) is sandwiched between two electrodes and polarizers oriented in perpendicular phases to each other. So in an uncharged state, i.e. when current is not passed, light cannot pass from one polarizer to the other as it gets effectively blocked. When current is applied, the TN liquid crystal molecules bend or "twist" the light coming from the first polarizer by 90 degrees so that it can now pass through the second polarizer. Before getting through to the second polarizer, the light passes through color filters for red, blue, and green.

This simple arrangement allows TN panels to offer very low response times. TN panels still constitute the majority of laptop displays as they can be configured to offer response times as low as 1 ms (gray-to-gray) and true 120+ Hz displays on a restricted budget making them an ideal choice for gaming displays. However, TN panels have narrow viewing angles and can only use 6 bits per RGB color, requiring the use of workarounds such as dithering to produce 16.7 million colors.

IPS displays are similar to TN displays for the most part except for the orientation of the liquid crystals. Unlike in TN panels, there is no helical twisting of crystals involved. Rather, the IPS liquid crystal molecules rotate by 90 degrees "in-plane", i.e. horizontally, to allow light to pass through and they are aligned to the display plane at all times. Both the electrodes are placed on the first polarizer so less light from the source can pass through compared to TN, requiring the use of much brighter light sources.

Compared to TN panels, IPS panels offer excellent color reproduction and wide viewing angles but are generally more expensive to produce. IPS panels make an excellent choice for graphics professionals who value color accuracy above anything else. IPS panels generally offer a standard 60 Hz refresh rate, but higher refresh rate options are also available nowadays. A point to be noted is that all IPS panels suffer inherently from some sort of IPS backlight bleeding (IPS glow). IPS glow cannot be avoided, but proper choice of panels during quality control can minimize its effects considerably.

Unlike the difference between IPS and TN panels, IGZO refers to the type of transistor used and not the liquid crystal orientation. IGZO transistors can be used in all kinds of LCD panels including TN, IPS, and even OLED.

Another advantage with IGZO is high electron mobility (20 to 50x more) compared to a-Si, which means better conductivity of current with much smaller transistor size. Although IGZO panels are expensive to produce, they have high refresh rates, higher pixel densities compared to typical a-Si TFT panels and significantly lower leakage current, making them an excellent choice for gamers. A still image displayed on an IGZO-TFT panel consumes way less power as the pixels remain charged without the need for continuous transistor refresh.

MSI not only offers high quality TN panels with fast refresh rates for gamers but also has 240 Hz IGZO options available in premium gaming laptops such as the GT76, GE65, and the GS65.

In this article, we have provided a brief overview into what goes into the design and selection of LCD panels for gaming notebooks. Although you can hook up your laptop to an external desktop monitor for enhanced multitasking, the primary display quality is very much essential when you go mobile. The factors to be prioritized depend on the target audience. For gamers, the primary considerations include low response times and high refresh rates, while professional users place emphasis on color accuracy and higher resolutions. For creatives who also game, it is essential to choose a panel that caters to both work and play. We will be looking into laptop LCD display choices for creative professionals in a subsequent article, so stay tuned for that.

We hope this primer on LCD panel selection for gamers was helpful in offering a high-level know-how into this important aspect of laptop purchase. Watch this space for more upcoming laptop 101 articles, including LCD panel design for creative workflows, touchpad design and more.

Besides this careful component matching it’s ensured that the latest GeForce RTX Turing graphics are at the centre of MSI laptops. Whether playing blockbuster games like Battlefield V with ray tracing for the very best image quality or working with creative apps like Autodesk 3DS Max, Adobe Premiere Pro and Lightroom or DaVinci Resolve, RTX Laptops are true "workhorses" for professionals, students, and gamers alike. They are perfect for combining leisure and work.

Why you can trust Tom"s HardwareOur expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

MSI may not have adopted an 18-inch display on its flagship laptop, but in our testing, we were still enamored. A mix of powerful performance from the Intel Core i9-13950HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 provided for one of the most powerful gaming laptops we"ve seen to date.

And that 17-inch, 16:9 display is no slouch. MSI has added Mini-LED technology, so the 4K 144 Hz display looks incredible. It"s not OLED, but in our tests, it often looked almost as good, with extremely high scores on both our light meter (511 nits) and our colorimeter (161.6% sRGB, 114.5% DCI-P3).

Add in a Cherry MX mechanical keyboard that"s an absolute pleasure to use (alongside per-key RGB backlighting to keep it looking good), and you get some luxury you don"t see in most gaming laptops (even if MSI doesn"t use the mechanical switches for the number keys or arrow keys).

The Lenovo Legion 5i Pro offers strong performance with a screen that lets you switch between high refresh rate gaming meant for esports or high resolution for more cinematic games. It"s a 16-inch, 2560 x 1600 panel that goes up to 165 Hz. That"s not the fastest we"ve seen on a gaming notebook, but it"s a nice balance.

The screen is a HIGH gamut LCD. If your existing LCD is a standard gamut LCD, you will encounter many issues when trying to upgrade it to high gamut type. Compatible PN B156HTN05.2 B156HTN05.1 AUO52ED.

The product comes from vaious manufactures, so the part number may vary. You may receive Chi Mei N156HHE-GA1, or AU Optronics B156HAN04.2, depending on inventory. If you prefer to receive one specific part number, please contact us beforehand. Compatible Product Line: Acer Helios 300, MSI GL63 8RE-673, Inspiron 7577, GL62M 7 REX Screen Size: 15.6 in Compatible Model: MSI GT62 GE63 GS63VR, Dell G7, Acer nitro 5, GL63 8SE G5 5587 Compatible Brand: For MSI Compatible Models: MSI GE62VR 7RF-296DE