Lenovo is refreshing its Legion Slim line of gaming laptops with compact bodies. The new Lenovo Legion Slim 7i and Legion Slim 7 are 4.4 pound notebooks with 16 inch displays and the latest Intel or AMD processors, respectively. They’ll be available this spring.
The new Legion Slim 5i and Legion Slim 5 notebooks will also be available this spring as slightly cheaper notebooks with 5.1 pound notebooks with 16 inch displays. But Lenovo also plans to launch a smaller model with a 14 inch display later this year.
The upcoming Lenovo Legion Slim 5 (14″) laptop will be positioned as part of the 8th-gen Lenovo Legion Slim family, just like its larger siblings. That means it will sport many of the same features, including a new Lenovo Artificial Intelligence (LA) chip that powers Lenovo’s new AI Engine+ “which dynamically adjusts the Lenovo Legion ColdFront 5.0 thermals” for optimized cooling.
Lenovo hasn’t announced detailed specs or pricing for the new 14 inch model yet, but the company says it will feature a 14 inch OLED display and an unspecified AMD Ryzen processor.
More details should be available closer to launch: the 8th-gen Lenovo Legion Slim 5 (14″) is expected to ship in October, 2023.
I’m a bit skeptical about the lifespan of OLED panels on a laptop, the burn-in effect seems like it would be especially annoying on a Gaming laptop.
However, I’d love to have my mind changed on this. Gaming is something that involves lots of persistent UI elements (ammo count, health bar, map, etc). That sounds like a recipe for burn-in.
I’ve considered the possibility of simply replacing the panel after some time, but looking at the prices of replacement OLED panels for Asus and Gigabyte laptops, they aren’t cheap. For a brand new panel, many sell for $300-$400. I’m worried to see the price of a high-refresh gaming panel. I wouldn’t be surprised if a 144hz+ OLED panel would sell for over $500.
I’ve been researching how OLED panels are being built with features that help against burn-in, but based on my research it seems most of these are just features that throttle your brightness to slow the damage, and also “pixel shift”, which actually moves the image around to prevent bright objects from standing still for too long. These don’t sound ideal at all.
OLED screens are cool on devices that only need to display an image for 10-15 minutes at a time, and don’t need to last longer than 2 years, like a Smartwatch, or Smartphone. Or maybe even on a VR headset, or an in-glasses AR display (where only a small amount of brightness is needed to achieve a vibrant image).
I’m not convinced that I want an OLED laptop, monitor, or TV yet.
What you explain is also why I chose an LED for a pricey laptop (when OLED laptops were first becoming mainstream) intentionally choosing NOT to be an early adopter for OLED, it also saved me at least 600$ by downgrading to LED, it took a few more months to ship though.
My experience being the early adopter is usually very bad. I was an early adopter for tablet touch pc’s when they first came out and the touch screen hardware simply broke about 2 years into the experiment, so the pricey tablet was delegated to being a clunky monitor with a wired keyboard and mouse that ended taking up more desk space than a full size laptop. I made up my mind at that point, that would never volunteer to be an early adopter / guinea pig for the benefit of shoddy big tech.