After a year of component shortages, demand squeezes, and rising prices it's refreshing to be able to talk about the tech that could well bring the best gaming laptop prices down over the next few years, and it's all in the display.
The Lenovo Legion R9000P took to market last week, offering the world's first Inkjet-Printed OLED display on a gaming laptop. The 240Hz panel sits atop the more premium rig, but it's not the sharpness, speed, or vibrancy we're talking about here. Instead, it's the manufacturing process that has fans like me excited.
How does Inkjet-Printed OLED manufacturing work?
OLED panels are typically produced using a Vacuum Thermal Evaporation process, in which the materials used to form the light-emitting diodes of the display itself are funnelled through a vacuum chamber and splattered over the top of a 'fine metal mask' to make sure all their red, green, and blue parts end up in the correct places. It's expensive and wastes a lot of material in the process, part of the reason OLED machines still command a higher price tag.
Instead, TCL CSOT's been working up to mass produced Inkjet-Printed OLEDs, most recently kickstarting its Gen 5.5 production line in 2024. What does that mean for you and me? The technology, in its barest terms, swaps that evaporated material for a liquid one.
This isn't the first time the brand has been working at bringing OLED rigs further down the price scale, though. The existing Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 10 was remarkably cheap for a gaming laptop with an OLED display last year, even if it suffered from a little glare as a result.
Lenovo Legion 5 (RTX 5060) | $1,449.99 (was $1,599.99) at Best Buy
Rather than wasting materials on a fine metal mask (like a stencil for layering the right parts over a glass substrate panel), Inkjet-Printed OLED manufacturing combines these materials into a soluble solution that is instead precisely positioned exactly where it needs to be. In its most basic terms, it's like printing a picture rather than spray painting over a cut-out.
The result is a much cheaper manufacturing process that Omdia estimated would cut "OLED notebook panel manufacturing costs by approximately 30 to 35%" earlier this year. We'll take anything we can get at a time like this.
For now, Lenovo's R9000P is generally stuck in the Chinese market but often make their way over to the West in the form of the Legion 5 Pro line.
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I'm also getting my hands on all the best Asus gaming laptops as well as the best Razer laptops and best Alienware laptops on the market.
