Promising more dimming zones and better HDR.
At CES 2020 MSI displays its laptop Creator 17 which is claimed to be the “world’s first” laptop to have a Mini LED panel. The 17-inch 4 K laptop monitor is able to dim and glow with significantly greater precision than LCD displays with conventional LED backlights while using even smaller LEDs as backlight. CNET notes that Mini LED displays typically use LEDs of less than 2 mm thickness.
The system will be particularly useful for HDR material viewing, which takes advantage of a clear contrast between light and dark picture surfaces. According to the MSI technology, the monitor has 240 local dimming zones, much given its 17-inch height. In contrast, the 6K$6,000 XDR monitor by Apple has 576 dimming areas which almost doubles the 32-inch height.
The light can also achieve a maximum luminosity of 1,000 nits. MSI has also the potential to view 100% of the DCI-P3 color screen with a lightness of 1000 nits which is considered a reasonable limit to achieve a respectable HDR efficiency. MSI claims the Creator 17 is the only laptop to accomplish this genius, but the last year HP’s Dragonfly starts to disagree.
THE 17-INCH SCREEEN HAS 240 Local DIMMING Zones Mini LED could provide more dimming areas than standard LED LCD displays, but it’s important to note that the display technology produced by Samsung is not the same as the latest and up to now really cheap MicroLED panel. The LEDs in a Mini LED monitor just backlight the LCD, and they replace it entirely with MicroLED. MicroLED seeks to give OLED a comparable level of efficiency without the brightness limitations or burn-in problems — the latter is a specific concern for computers.
Also remember that a Mini LED backlight alone is no guarantee of the accuracy of the screen. See Rtings summary for the last year’s Mini LED-equipped Q825 TCL 8 model, which CNET states was the first Mini LED TV on the market. Although Rtings believed that overall local dimming was good, he criticized the local dimming algorithm monitoring LEDs, which could smash dark scenes information and confuse them at certain times.
MSI never has a release date or pricing information to reveal for Creator 17 and we have not yet any knowledge of the internal requirements.