In the past, SHARP was about the only company to make high quality TFT panels (and which still work like the first day today), and yes it was very expensive.
In any case, be very careful with this area.
You could easily burn out your laptop's display circuit.
Well, it was just a little note to take good care of this subject.

In general the old laptops have even worse panels than the bad modern ones, which can be absolutely terrible. It wasn't until VA and IPS you started to get decent viewing angles and good enough contrast but you won't find these from stuff older than P4 era.
HPA ghosts less than DSTN but on other regards it is pretty much just as bad as DSTN is. You will not get good viewing angles and contrast from any of the old LCD techs found in the retro laptops, at best you get something that reaches a modern bad LCD where black is light grey and colors go weird when you move your head enough 🤣.

False. If you have found a notebook with TFT panel from that old era 486 and pentium era, will be nice. I had a Thinkpad 701C once. Very nice TFT and was IBM 16K 486SLC but problem was the 2.5" is MCA interface. Moving era farther back, I had a Compaq LTE 386s/20 with better quality in 16 grey scale LCD in greys for few years of use. Was intended for college and modified it by replacing the CPU with AMD 386sx 25 and bumped the clock to 25MHz. This made notebook much more useful.

Compaq did release a 386SL notebook using a monochrome TFT and standard 44 pin 2.5" IDE. I have one in question.

Cheers,

Thank you everyone for the answers. I just bought a DELL Inspiron I2500 with a 15 inches screen and a Pentium III 900Mhz for 25 bucks. I guess the screen will not be as I expected but it seems to be a nice laptop for Win98.

Tiido wrote on 2022-09-25, 17:37:

HPA ghosts less than DSTN but on other regards it is pretty much just as bad as DSTN is. You will not get good viewing angles and contrast from any of the old LCD techs found in the retro laptops, at best you get something that reaches a modern bad LCD where black is light grey and colors go weird when you move your head enough 🤣.

I was asking because as I said, I've got both one laptop with DSTN and one with HPA. You are right the ghosting is better with the HPA, but the viewing angle is just a nightmare, whatever you sit in front of it. The viewing angle of the DSTN is a lot better as well as the colors. I find it very enjoyable for old DOS games, it is very colorful. Only problem it doesn't have sound, so I'm doing with the PC speaker and a parallel sound card I made.

I think that with TN panels in general, active matrix or passive, the viewing angle situation gets a bit worse with every bump in resolution - I find VGA DSTN screens to look quite nice but pretty much every 800x600 DSTN panel I've seen ends up looking 'cloudy' with colours non-uniform across the panel.

Most early TFT laptops that I'm aware of from the 90s don't really have great viewing angles compared to what we have now, but TFTs then were highly regarded simply for the huge improvement over previous technologies. They were fresh screens back then too, most of the CCFL displays wear out from use and the polariser can get a bit less uniform over time (until it just fails).
Checking a modern-ish 640x480 TFT on my T4900CT - the horizontal viewing angles aren't great, the colours shift a bit going past around 30-40 degrees either side (60-80ish total).
Looking up and down is just the same as a modern TN panel with the colours shifting and inverting, but maybe less pronounced than on much later TN screens.

Checking the really old style 640x480 8.4" on my T1950CT though is different, the viewing angle horizontally is more like 80 degrees either side or ~160 total. It uses an older style of manufacturing and doesn't 'look' as though the polariser is plastic like on the T4900CT and current TFTs. Up and down is not great but that's just as much a limitation of the backlighting system as it is the panel.
For anyone curious, I took a picture of it with the screen mask off when I got it: Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Interesting, they must've changed something as TFTs went into mass manufacture, so perhaps the first TFTs really did look quite amazing.

IBM did IPS panels way before Apple did. They called them FlexView panels.

I believe the earliest model you can get with an IPS panel is the ThinkPad A30p which is a very capable Pentium 3 machine with a Radeon 7500. The A31p model uses the same panel, coupled with a Pentium 4 (max. 2.6 GHz), a TnL capable Radeon 7800 and - still - full SoundBlaster support with 9x drivers. That machine is way too overpowered, but that makes it interesting.

The panels are 1600x1200 resolution. Later in the Pentium M era they also did some panels with 1400x1050 before they abandoned them for a few years until the technology was more mature.

The UXGA panels from A30p/A31p machines can also be transplanted back into the A22p, which gives you an amazing DOS machine with a Rage 128 (16 MB), SoundBlaster support and the ability to put an IBM Dock II with a full PCI slot on there. For me, this is peak DOS gaming on a notebook.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-09-25, 23:37:

I think that with TN panels in general, active matrix or passive, the viewing angle situation gets a bit worse with every bump i […]
Show full quote

I think that with TN panels in general, active matrix or passive, the viewing angle situation gets a bit worse with every bump in resolution - I find VGA DSTN screens to look quite nice but pretty much every 800x600 DSTN panel I've seen ends up looking 'cloudy' with colours non-uniform across the panel.

Most early TFT laptops that I'm aware of from the 90s don't really have great viewing angles compared to what we have now, but TFTs then were highly regarded simply for the huge improvement over previous technologies. They were fresh screens back then too, most of the CCFL displays wear out from use and the polariser can get a bit less uniform over time (until it just fails).
Checking a modern-ish 640x480 TFT on my T4900CT - the horizontal viewing angles aren't great, the colours shift a bit going past around 30-40 degrees either side (60-80ish total).
Looking up and down is just the same as a modern TN panel with the colours shifting and inverting, but maybe less pronounced than on much later TN screens.

Checking the really old style 640x480 8.4" on my T1950CT though is different, the viewing angle horizontally is more like 80 degrees either side or ~160 total. It uses an older style of manufacturing and doesn't 'look' as though the polariser is plastic like on the T4900CT and current TFTs. Up and down is not great but that's just as much a limitation of the backlighting system as it is the panel.
For anyone curious, I took a picture of it with the screen mask off when I got it: Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Interesting, they must've changed something as TFTs went into mass manufacture, so perhaps the first TFTs really did look quite amazing.

Yes you are right, most DSTN I saw looked cloudy as you said, you can really see it on a full black screen. But with colorful pictures, they look quite good to my eyes.
I just found a video about your T1950CT on Youtube and it looks amazing, sadly I can't find one right now.
Yesterday I made a side by side checking of both my HPA and DSTN laptops with the same games. For anything requesting contrast the HPA won hands down, while colorful pictures were better on the DSTN. And as said the DSTN has better viewing angles but the HPA laptop is 800x600 while the DSTN is only 640x480.

schmatzler wrote on 2022-09-26, 01:28:

IBM did IPS panels way before Apple did. They called them FlexView panels. […]
Show full quote

IBM did IPS panels way before Apple did. They called them FlexView panels.

I believe the earliest model you can get with an IPS panel is the ThinkPad A30p which is a very capable Pentium 3 machine with a Radeon 7500. The A31p model uses the same panel, coupled with a Pentium 4 (max. 2.6 GHz), a TnL capable Radeon 7800 and - still - full SoundBlaster support with 9x drivers. That machine is way too overpowered, but that makes it interesting.

The panels are 1600x1200 resolution. Later in the Pentium M era they also did some panels with 1400x1050 before they abandoned them for a few years until the technology was more mature.

The UXGA panels from A30p/A31p machines can also be transplanted back into the A22p, which gives you an amazing DOS machine with a Rage 128 (16 MB), SoundBlaster support and the ability to put an IBM Dock II with a full PCI slot on there. For me, this is peak DOS gaming on a notebook.

I wish I can find one of those, they seem to be pretty rare.
Only laptop I know with a 1600x1200 panel resolution is the DELL Inpiron 8100 but it is TFT and not IPS.