Difference in quality of the display screen between T540p and L540?

I'm looking to buy my first ever Thinkpad for my home-based business. I'll be using mostly Sage 50 Accounting, Excel, Word and Adobe Acrobat. I want a nice keyboard and a nice 15.6" FHD screen so I've narrowed it down to the T540p and L540. I was just curious if there is a major difference in the viewing quality between the FHD screens in these two models? Are they the same screen even or is one plainly better than the other?

Thanks for your help.

 

Welcome to the forum!

The FHD panel is shared between these two models, and it's nothing to write home about. Not anywhere near what was seen on T/W 510/520/530 in FHD guise.

 

Thank you for the warm welcome!

Hmmm, that's a shame regarding the FHD screens. Perhaps the bump to the 3K display would be worthwhile. I've read that the resolution of the 3K screen makes text very small and hard to read. I use a lot of Excel spreadsheets so I'm wondering if this would be an issue?

 

Usually when LCDs start to show their shortcomings is where color is involved like photos and movies, but a good display is always welcome no matter what you're doing. I would think a decent TN panel is sufficient for Excel, depending on how picky you are. If it's mostly going to sit on the desk, perhaps getting a quality desktop monitor might be worth a look. For less money, you'll get a better display.

 

You of course set the scaling in Windows appropriately, Win 7 sets it to 150% by default. Unless of course you have magnifying glass, then you can set it to 100% if you want to.

 

If you get an external monitor, be aware that the 3K laptop display will have a completely different DPI. The end result is you can't have an optimal text size on both screens (windows 7), or text is blurry on one because everything is rendered at one size and then raster resized (windows 8.x). 1080p ought to be such that you don't need any scaling and this is a non-issue, though there is the display quality issue...

 

Trying to obtain a NOS T/W530 with FHD panel could be another viable option...

 

Thanks for the good info everybody. I guess I've been spoiled by my wife's Macbook Pro with the retina display which made me want a ThinkPad with a nice screen. I've been going back and forth between the the FHD and the 3K panel. It's surprising the FHD screens are not as good as the last generation. I like the idea of getting an external monitor. The T/W530 models don't seem to have a number pad which is something I really want. Hmm, I'll have to think about it some more.

Thanks guys.

 

You can try a couple of things, either buy the T530 with the nice FHD display, buy a T540p with the 3K display and scale it down to 1080P, Buy the T540p with the lowest resolution possible and buy the aftermarket 1080p IPS display currently available, *voids warranty, so keep and replace old screen if you choose latter option before servicing*