6. The Libretto U100's Display: Beautiful But Really Small

The Libretto U100's display looks fantastic. Its mean brightness is 161 cd/m2. The display's contrast ratio is 303:1. As the charts that follow show the U100 compares very well with its three competitors. It is the brightest of the four laptops included in this review and its contrast is bettered only by Sony's TX670P.

Interestingly both the U100 and the TX670P use LED backlighting. Check out the TX670P article for technical details on LED backlighting and for more on the TX670P's backlight system. Toshiba beat Sony to the market with LED backlighting in the U100. The Toshiba's 32 LED backlight system shows a small amount of the characteristic bottom-of-display flare seen on the TX670P. The Libretto U100's uniformity of brightness trailed that of the Sony and the Dell Latitude X1 as you can see in the chart labeled Spatial Uniformity of Brightness. However, even with these limitations the U100's display appears sharp, bright and contrasty.

The only concern I have about the U100's display is its size and the limits to readability imposed by its optimal resolution of 1280 x 768. I have been blessed with uncorrected super nearsightedness. I have no trouble with the tiny letters on the Libretto's screen at 1280 x 768. However, others who have seen the screen struggled to read anything on it, even those with prescription reading glasses. Dropping resolution to 1024 x 768 produces more readable though a bit less sharp fonts. At the lowest resolution 600 x 800, type is easy to read and about as sharp as at 1024 x 768. Nicely, unlike a number of laptops, the display remains in wide screen mode at both 1024 x 768 and 600 x 800.