The Best 4K Laptops for 2024 (2024)

Many computing terms are confusing, but one is an outright lie: The claim that 1,366-by-768-pixel notebook screens are "HD "or high definition. A display's resolution—its horizontal by vertical pixel count—determines the sharpness or clarity of the images it shows. A resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels, known as Full HD or FHD, was cutting-edge for HDTVs in 2003 but is now found in only the cheapest sets. It's today's baseline even for low-cost laptops.

Most HDTVs today quadruple that, showing the equivalent of a grid of four full HD screens: 3,840 by 2,160 pixels with a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio. It's not surprising that you'd want this resolution, dubbed 4K or Ultra HD (UHD), for viewing streaming video or doing content creation work such as editing images or videos, so several upscale laptops feature 4K displays. Many recent models have adopted the slightly taller aspect ratio of 16:10, so they say 4K or UHD to indicate an array of 3,840 by 2,400 pixels.

Are you a candidate for a 4K laptop? It depends on the work you do, the programs you run, and the kind of notebook you need (probably a 15-inch or larger laptop; many find 4K resolution too squinty-small on a 13- or 14-inch compact). Chances are a UHD display will be a costly indulgence if your computing is limited to word processing and email, but if you're into multimedia content creation, image or video editing, or demanding workstation apps, it'll spoil you for anything less.

Let's take it in steps: First, we'll provide a quick rundown of our picks for the best 4K laptops of 2024. Then we'll take a closer look at notebook display resolutions, their impact on issues like gaming and battery life, and how to find the right (if one is indeed right) 4K laptop for you.

Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks

Buying Guide: The Best 4K Laptops for 2024

Before we go on, a clarification: While we use the terms "4K" and "UHD" interchangeably, they're technically not the same. The latter is the consumer display, broadcast, and computing standard of 3,840 by 2,160 pixels. What film purists call 4K displays are used in professional production and digital cinemas, and they measure 4,096 by 2,160 pixels. Having learned that, you can forget it; laptop manufacturers, like Blu-ray boxes, mix up UHD and 4K every day.

You can also, as we said, forget the few 11-inch Chromebooks and supercheap Windows laptops still limited to 1,366-by-768-pixel resolution. Today's minimum acceptable laptop screen standard is a layout of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels, abbreviated as FHD or 1080p resolution.

The p in "1080p" stands for progressive, meaning the computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) draws the horizontal lines in succession; some early HDTVs used 1080i (for interlaced) technology that drew every other line, then went back to fill in the lines in between. Either way, drawing the entire screen—1,080 horizontal lines of 1,920 pixels each—typically happens 60 times a second, for what's known as a refresh rate of 60 hertz (60Hz).

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Your eyes can't keep up with such rapid redrawing, so your brain processes the display as steady or smooth. Indeed, movie screens are far larger than laptops or TV sets, but you see their images as smooth despite being shown only 24 frames per second (fps). Most people perceive TV and notebook screens as showing flicker at frame rates below 30fps, and hardcore gamers prefer to view animated action or fast-twitch fragging at 60fps or more—the reason many gaming laptops feature screen refresh rates of 120Hz, 144Hz, or even 300Hz.

If you divide 1,920 by 16 and multiply by 9, you get 1,080—we mentioned earlier that most HDTVs and many laptops have a screen aspect ratio of 16:9, the horizontal-to-vertical proportion that applies to both 1080p and 4K. It also applies to 720p—aka 1,280 by 720 pixels, the lower resolution of the first HDTV sets (and too many laptop webcams, though 1080p resolution is a minimum for them, too).

We also said that aspect ratio isn't inflexible—before 16:9 rectangles ruled the industry, laptop screens had closer-to-square 4:3 layouts (1,024 by 768 pixels, for example), and the last couple of years have brought a surge in slightly less rectangular 16:10 displays. Some desktop monitors, inversely, go even more rectangular, with an ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratio for a panoramic view of multiple application windows or cinematic content.

What Resolutions Do Laptops Have Between Full HD and 4K?

Do resolutions in between 1080p and UHD exist? Sure. Many gaming monitors and some laptops display at 1440p—2,560 by 1,440 pixels, dubbed QHD because it's quad HD (720p) the way 4K is a two-by-two grid of 1080p. It provides sharper views of the gaming arena than 1080p but requires a relatively small increase in GPU horsepower compared with 4K.

Entry-level or affordable laptops that embrace today's fashionable 16:10 screen aspect ratio show 1,920 by 1,200 instead of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels. You can find 16:10 gaming rigs with 2,560-by-1,600-pixel panels and chic ultraportable compacts with 2,880 by 1,800 (or QHD+) resolution, the last often with vivid OLED screens.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

A few Windows laptops, tablets, and Chromebooks have squarer 3:2 aspect ratio displays, such as the 1,920-by-1,280 IPS and 3,000-by-2,000 OLED choices of the HP Dragonfly G4. They're better for productivity than multimedia (unless you like black bars above and below your videos), but great for seeing more of a document or webpage without scrolling.

Apple marches to the beat of its own drum when it comes to screen resolutions. Today's 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air laptops pack 2,560 by 1,664 and 2,880 by 1,864 pixels respectively. The 14-inch MacBook Pro's Liquid Retina XDR display has a 3,024-by-1,964 resolution; the 16-inch Pro's has 3,456 by 2,234.

(Credit: Brian Westover)

And yes, the latest and most expensive HDTV sets put out 8K resolution—7,680 by 4,320 pixels in a 16:9 aspect ratio. You'll find scarce legitimate 8K content available, so owners of these beauties mostly watch lower-resolution movies and shows upscaled to 8K, and no one's bothered to build an 8K laptop yet.

IPS, OLED, Mini LED: What Are the Different Kinds of 4K Panels?

You can dive into the details in our guide to laptop screen types, but to put it briefly, today's high-res notebooks make use of three different technologies. All look fantastic, but each has its advantages and disadvantages.

Today's classic notebook design is a liquid crystal display with in-plane switching (IPS) architecture, so named because its molecules remain parallel rather than perpendicular to the front and back polarizers when voltage is applied. IPS screens provide more uniform color and wider viewing angles than the now-legacy twisted nematic (TN) LCDs they replaced.

IPS laptop screens would be too dim to make out without built-in light-emitting diode (LED) backlights. The lowest-cost panels are edge-lit, with light shining from the borders of the display; higher-quality ones are full-array-lit, with light sources arranged or spread behind the whole panel. Backlighting or brightness is measured in nits, which is slang for candelas per square meter. Bargain laptops have 250- or 300-nit screens, but we like to see at least 400 nits from an IPS panel, and some mobile workstations boast 500 or 600 nits. (Many rugged laptops deliver 1,000 nits or more, making them bright enough to read in outdoor sunlight.)

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Mini LED panels are a recent—and still relatively scarce and expensive—type of full-array-lit IPS screen with a greater number of smaller LEDs spread over the backlight area. This permits a denser array of backlighting or what are called "dimming zones," with each zone covering fewer pixels.

Such screens tend to be slower or fall short of the high refresh rates of gaming laptops' IPS panels, but mini LED delivers richer color by reducing a problem that plagues IPS tech: the backlight glowing through what are supposed to be black or dark areas of the screen image, which yields lower contrast (a spectrum of white to dark gray instead of white to truly black).

Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens don't reduce the problem of backlight seeping through—they cure it. That's because every pixel of an OLED panel is its own dimming zone, able to be turned on or off individually. This yields a sumptuous color with unbeatable contrast—blacks are genuinely black because the pixel is completely dark.

Of course, OLED displays are more costly than IPS panels but have come down sharply in the last couple of years, even reaching under-$1,000 laptops (though you'll get 1080p, not 4K, at that price). They're not as bright as IPS but, thanks to their sky-high contrast, they don't have to be; a 350-to-400-nit OLED panel is just as pleasing to the eye as a 500-nit IPS screen.

What Are the Downsides of 4K Laptops?

Aside from arguably making icons and other screen elements too small on compact ultraportables, why isn't 4K resolution standard on every laptop? Frankly, it's more expensive. A 1080p liquid crystal display has almost 2.1 million pixels, but a 4K panel has about 8.3 million (with a 16:9 aspect ratio; 9.2 million if it's 16:10). More precise manufacturing takes more money, and—brace yourself—laptop makers pass those costs on to you.

What would happen to your electric bill if you replaced each light bulb in your home with four? A 4K laptop screen draws more power than a 1080p display, which (all else being equal) means shorter battery life. This isn't a big issue in terms of real-world buying decisions—today's IPS, OLED, and mini LED screens are much more power-efficient than their predecessors, and Apple's 16-inch MacBook Pro lasted almost 28 hours in our unplugged rundown despite its 7.7 million pixels—but it's a factor.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Also, if you quadrupled the number of light bulbs in your house, you'd have to work a lot faster if you wanted to change them all in the same amount of time. As we said, it's a minor technological miracle that your PC redraws its display 60 or more times every second. Laptop processors' integrated graphics can do it quickly enough to be fine for office apps and streaming video. But a smooth, stutter-free display when creating VR worlds, performing CGI rendering, or playing a fast-paced game demands a dedicated GPU like those of gaming laptops or mobile workstations.

And maintaining a rapid pixel flow with 8 million pixels on the screen is a quite the lift. The days when speedy visuals required a high-end desktop with multiple graphics cards in motherboard slots are long gone; even under-$1,000 gaming laptops with fairly modest mobile GPUs can play demanding titles at 60 frames per second at 1080p resolution. A midrange GPU can provide satisfying gameplay at 1440p.

But choose to play at 4K—and demand, as serious gamers do, more than 60fps? You're pushing the limits of even the highest-priced, hottest-running silicon in Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon GPU families. Forget about gaming on battery power rather than plugging into an AC outlet. Get used to relatively heavy, bulky chassis and noisy cooling fans. And expect to empty your wallet.

What's Is 4K Good for in a Laptop?

So, gaming at 4K remains a bridge too far for most laptops and budgets, though it's coming closer every year. Regardless, you'll find other reasons to be tempted by a higher-than-high-resolution display.

True, if you spend most of your time in a web browser or word processor zoomed to full screen, a 4K display will be wasted on you. If you're a spreadsheet jockey or junkie, you'll see more rows and columns without scrolling, which may or may not be worth the expense. But if you like to arrange your applications in adjacent windows instead of switching from one full screen to another, 4K may not replace a desktop multi-monitor setup but does give you more room to work, boosting productivity by showing more data with less reaching for the touchpad or Alt-Tab keys.

And if your workday involves digital content creation—editing or assembling images or videos as a streamer, photographer, artist, illustrator, animator, videographer, or designer—you probably learned the value of high resolution long ago. Whether editing 4K videos, touching up wedding photos, or exploring AI or VR images, a big, sharp screen is essential.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

And that goes double for architects, engineers, and others who work with computer-aided design (CAD), 2D or 3D modeling, CGI rendering, and data mapping and analysis projects that call for more than ordinary PCs—powerful professional workstations like HP's ZBook, Dell's Precision, and Lenovo's ThinkPad P series, with independent software vendor (ISV) certifications that guarantee compatibility with demanding specialized apps.

Mobile workstations, even more than gaming rigs, are the supercomputers of the laptop world, built to work long hours crunching through giant datasets and visually presenting their results with the sharpest detail and most accurate color available. A workstation without a high-res screen and dedicated GPU hardly qualifies for the name.

It comes down to this: Elite professional tasks demand elite professional displays. The days when laptops couldn't join desktops in this arena are long gone, and an ever-increasing array of OLED, IPS, and mini LED 4K screen choices proves it. Whichever you choose from our above picks, you'll get an ideal portable platform available for serious productivity and creativity. And okay, yes, gaming—we won't tell if you won't.

So, Which 4K Laptop Is the Best to Buy?

Below, we've broken out in detail the specs for our top picks outlined at the start of this guide. We expect to see more and more 4K-equipped models debut as the year goes on, so stay tuned for more choices as we update this guide when new models cross PC Labs' test bench.