The Philips AmbientLED 12.5-watt A19 LED lightbulb (quite a name!) is probably the favorite LED bulb that I’ve tried so far. It beats the competition when it comes to light output (800 lumens vs. 450-590 lumens for the other LEDs that I’ve tried), the design of the bulb is very innovative, and light quality is excellent.
The Philips AmbientLED is rated for 25,000 hours, which translates to an average usable lifetime of about 15 years according to Philips. Not only that LEDs do not use mercury, like CFLs do. I’ve been wanting to try out an LED bulb but the cost has been prohibitive. But I don’t think I’m calculating the cost correctly. For instance, how much does it cost when an incandescent or CFL bulb goes out and you have to go to the nearest hardware store to get some bulbs, every year for 15 years? Not having to worry about light bulbs for 15 years might be worth the US$39.95 asking price.
Lenovo: The ThinkPad X220 Tablet makes use of a 12.5-inch 1366×768 IPS TFT LCD. There are two versions. One is a two-finger touch, five-finger gesture with an Infinity Glass cover. The other makes use of directly bonded Corning Gorilla Glass for pen input. It’s about time IPS made a comeback in notebook PCs.
The 12.5-inch screen on our review unit of the ThinkPad X220 is an optional IPS panel with LED backlighting. The screen features the same 1366 x 768 resolution as the standard display, but the IPS panel provides greater screen brightness, more contrast and wider viewing angles. Our lab test results show this screen has a 743:1 contrast ratio and a peak brightness of 263 nit. Horizontal and vertical viewing angles are quite simply superb; we barely noticed any color distortion even out to extreme viewing angles.
The 12.5-inch 1366 x 768 matte display on the ThinkPad X220 offers bright, sharp images and amazingly wide viewing angles. Even standing at 90 degrees to the left or right, we were able to watch videos without noticing a significant loss of color fidelity. Our only complaint is that Lenovo chose to go with a 16:9, 1366 x 768 aspect ratio after offering 16:10, 1280 x 800 displays on the ThinkPad X201. While 1366 x 768 has become a standard, it offers less vertical real estate for viewing documents and web pages.
A matte IPS LCD on a notebook. Simply brilliant. I also prefer more vertical pixels given the choice, as long as there are at least 1280 (or 1920) horizontal pixels. For example, I would pick 1280×800 over 1366×768, and 1920×1200 over 1920×1080. I also do not like pixel formats that are in between 1280 and 1920 horizontal pixels such as: 1440×900, 1600×900, 1680×1050. HD video, whether 720p or 1080p, will always need to be scaled, which means less video quality. Having said that the loss of 32 vertical pixels isn’t such a big deal if that means I get to have IPS. But there is just one problem with IPS: You need to watch out for peepers in public spaces and in airplanes, especially when you’re working on sensitive stuff.
And just like that, it’s open. No clips, just tons of glue.
As much as we hated trying to remove the clips in the original iPad, this much adhesive is even more of a pain. Be ready to crack your front panel if you dare open it! We’ll be investigating the best way to get inside over the next few weeks.
A few screws here and there hold down the LCD screen. Not a problem for the iFixit team!
Apple seems to love glue. I’ve shared this before but when I cracked open a defective Bluetooth keyboard, the entire bottom panel was secured by tons of glue. Steve Jobs is known to hate screws, so glue it is.
The LCD looks to be a module, which is different from what you get when you open up the 11.6-inch MacBook Air: the LCD is just the LCD cell and the backlight without the fattening module around it. This design points to a future iPad 3 that could be even thinner.
