Asus’s Zenbooks are known for being quite lightweight and quite affordable. But the company is adding another calling card to the line: OLED display technology.
The new 14-inch Zenbook 14X OLED will be available with either a 4K OLED HDR display or a 2.8K OLED 90Hz display. Given those resolutions, either should be a significant step up in picture quality from the Zenbook 13 OLED, the ultraportable OLED model Asus released earlier this year. That device has an FHD OLED display (which was still quite vivid and bright in our testing).
The Zenbook 14X OLED will cover 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut and a 0.2ms response time. Asus claims it will emit “70 percent less harmful blue light than normal LCD”.
Screen aside, the 14X weighs 3.09 pounds and is 0.67 inches thick — decently portable, though there are thinner and lighter 14-inchers out there. It can be configured with 11th-Gen Intel processors up to a Core i7, as well as 16GB of memory and 1TB of storage. Port selection includes Thunderbolt 4, HDMI 2.0, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, and a microSD reader.
That all sounds good, but the big question mark is battery life. A high-resolution screen in a thin and light laptop can sometimes be a recipe for disaster there, as we’ve seen time and time again. The Zenbook 13 OLED lasted over 11 hours in our testing, which is excellent, but that screen has many fewer pixels to power.
The Zenbook 14X OLED starts at $1,399.99 — a lot more than the Zenbook 13 OLED, which starts at $799. That’s not necessarily surprising, given the 14-incher’s larger and higher-resolution screen.
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There’s a convertible version of the 14X coming as well — the Zenbook 14 Flip OLED. That model has the same resolution options, and its touch display supports a “4096-pressure-level stylus”.
The new release follows Samsung’s announcement in January that the company would start mass-producing 14-inch 90Hz OLED panels this year. The new Zenbook may be the first of many 14-inch OLED notebooks to hit shelves in the next few months; Samsung did not release a list of partners at the time of its announcement.
