Best High-Resolution Laptops
If you edit photos, videos, or text, you might appreciate the extra pixels provided by the displays on these models
When you shop through retailer links on our site, we may earn affiliate commissions. 100% of the fees we collect are used to support our nonprofit mission. Learn more.
The full HD screens commonly found on today's laptops pack plenty of pixels. But sometimes you need more.
If you regularly edit 4K video, stream movies with lush cinematography, or work with long, dense text documents in Microsoft Word, you may find yourself longing for the crisp, clear text and images provided by a laptop with a high-resolution display.
And if you’re a gamer, a high-resolution display will grant you full access to the eye-popping detail in modern classics such as “Apex Legends,” “Dota 2,” and “Resident Evil 2.”
Many of the laptops in our ratings have a UHD display (also known as 4K), which has four times the number of pixels found in a Full HD display (also known as 1080p). Other models aren't quite as flush with pixels but still offer at least 50 percent more than full HD. Either way, you're getting significantly more detail with which to work and play.
To be sure, there are trade-offs. For starters, high-resolution displays tend to be more expensive than their full HD counterparts: Dell, for example, adds $300 to the price of a new 13-inch XPS when you upgrade to a UHD display. On HP's new 13-inch Spectre, that upgrade costs only $100 more.
Then there are battery life concerns. Moving around so many pixels puts a serious strain on your power reserves. How much of a strain? In late 2017, our testers found that the full HD version of a Lenovo Yoga laptop logged 14 hours of battery life per charge; the 4K version delivered only 7.5 hours.
Every year, Consumer Reports buys dozens of laptops from retail stores (to prevent manufacturers from giving our test samples special treatment) and runs those laptops through our labs, objectively rating them on criteria such as display quality and performance.
Here are some of the best laptops we’ve seen recently with displays that go beyond Full HD.
