#155
Post
by jayk » Thu Dec 02, 2010 6:01 pm
I guess it's the LCD upgrade time of the year. In addition to upgrading the panel on my trusty T60 (to UXGA), I recently picked up an X201 off Lenovo's outlet site and just swapped out its crappy panel for an HV121WX4-120 I picked up on E-bay. This is the matte version of the AFFS screen people rave about. Wow - what a difference - the new panel is fantastic! Black level is great, viewing angles is great, brightness is great. Video looks amazing. I got mine for $200 and then spent another $100 on the inverter and new cable assembly. The actual job of swapping displays was a bit tougher than I'd expected - you have to disassemble a fair amount of the machine, and it took me about 1-1/2 hours total. But, for me at least, it was totally worth it (I'm really picky about laptop displays). The machine, which is otherwise very nice (in terms of performance and form-factor), is now really exceptional.
Unfortunately the supply of HV121WX4-120s seems to be pretty variable, and the asking prices can be high, but I understand there's another AFFS or similar panel that also fits (there's a thread about it in here someplace).
- Jay
PS: One warning about the conversion. In addition to the new panel, you also need to get a CCFL inverter and new LCD cable assembly (the inverter is 42W8010 and the cable is 44C9909). I purchased a cable off Ebay from a supplier in Hong Kong (because it was cheap) and, when I received it, found that it was identical to the cable for the LED-backlit display (44C9991), even though it was clearly labeled as 44C9909 (which is the assy for the CCFL panel). They were selling a mis-labeled assembly. After spending a fair amount of time sending pictures and explaining this to them they refunded my money and removed the erroneous listings from ebay, but overall this delayed things by almost 3 weeks. I ended up buying a cable directly from Lenovo/IBM which cost almost twice as much but was, of course, the correct part (and also was packaged much better than the one from HK).
mod note: merged post with existing thread.