The ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED Review: For The Creator In All Of Us
by Brett Howse on March 7, 2022 8:30 AM ESTBattery Life
ASUS outfits the Vivobook Pro 15 with a 63 Wh battery, which is perhaps on the small size for a 15-inch notebook, but with the light weight of this design it makes more sense. OLED displays can be very efficient on darker content, but one of the bigger problems in the PC space is that so much content is bright so that will certainly impact the results as well.
Web Battery Life
As expected, the OLED display is somewhat of a burden on the web test, where most of the websites have a light theme. Battery life is still good, but not spectacular.
Looking at the normalized results where the battery size is removed from the equation further confirms this. Platform efficiency is not fantastic especially compared to the Surface Laptop Studio which has a 35-Watt CPU and larger GPU. This is the biggest drawback for OLED on a notebook computer, even with the operating system supporting dark mode. Until all of the applications support dark mode, and especially web, OLED is definitely going to impact battery life in a negative way.
PCMark 10 Modern Office Battery
UL’s PCMark 10 battery life test does fare better than our web browsing test. The test does not always run full-screen with light-colored applications so the OLED display does not cause as large of an impact to the battery life results.
Movie Playback
Media playback is often one of the least demanding tasks thanks to the video decode being offloaded to fixed function hardware that is very efficient, and OLED does well here with the dark scenes allowing the power advantages of OLED to be shown.
The Tesseract score divides the movie playback time at 200 nits by the length of The Avengers to give an idea of how many movies can be watched on a single charge. With five movies plus, the Vivobook Pro 15 OLED can definitely do well as a media playback device.
Charge Time
The other side of the equation for mobility is charge time. The Vivobook Pro 15 ships with a 120-Watt AC Adapter to power it during high-demand loads, so the charge rate certainly won’t be held back by the power input. Manufacturers still limit the charge rate though to protect the battery longevity.
To refill the 63 Wh battery takes just 145 minutes, which is quite good. To get to 50% charge took just 38 minutes, so a quick fill-up on the go is in the cards.
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edechamps - Monday, March 7, 2022 - link
"Sadly, Windows does not offer great support for either HDR or wider than sRGB color spaces. There is no native color management system in Windows which will display sRGB content at the correct color levels on a wider than sRGB display, which means the colors will be over-saturated unless you are using a properly color-managed application such as Adobe Photoshop. That means most content you look at on this notebook will be the oversaturated. […] Sadly Windows still does not handle non-sRGB color gamuts very well, so even though ASUS has done a reasonable job calibrating the display, most of the time the color accuracy will be terrible unless you are using a color managed application."This is NOT correct when using Windows with HDR mode enabled. In HDR mode, Windows correctly gamut-maps sRGB from SDR apps to the absolute BT.2020 color space "container" used for HDR, transparently and in real time. Apps that want to use the extra color space are free to do so using the relevant Microsoft APIs, and they will be properly presented alongside other apps. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dir...
I'm doing precisely this using Windows 11 in HDR mode with an LG OLED TV. I have personally verified using a color meter that standard sRGB apps are being gamut-mapped correctly, and the saturation is correct, with only slight errors caused by the TV's imperfect calibration.
The quote above describes a state of affairs that was certainly valid a few years ago, but it is now quite outdated.
Brett Howse - Tuesday, March 8, 2022 - link
Thanks for this info. I am going to look into this more. In HDR it does appear to tone map to sRGB by default which is certainly the less offensive implementation.Oxford Guy - Sunday, March 13, 2022 - link
Check out the tftcentral site and possibly prad.de (if that’s still around). Those sites have long had rather comprehensive information about all of the nuances involving monitors. Prad.de, for instance, was the first to write about LCD backlight flicker.lemurbutton - Monday, March 7, 2022 - link
If you’re a creator, you get a MacBook Pro with far more power and portability.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, March 8, 2022 - link
How is a macbook pro mroe portable then this? And it may surprise you, but not all creators are addicted to daddy Ives ruining their wallet every year.jospoortvliet - Saturday, March 12, 2022 - link
Battery life is better indeed but price is far far higher… I’d consider a MacBook Air though, for at least a subset of creator taks (audio, image and video editing) it would do great.yetanotherhuman - Tuesday, March 8, 2022 - link
Numpad to the left of the keyboard? Looks like it's on the right, as standard, to me..TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, March 8, 2022 - link
OLED is an interesting feature however with these slim bezel laptops replacing the display is a royal PITA and sometimes isnt possible (looking at you HP G5 chromebooks). With burn in as an issue I'd be hesitant.The battery is another sticking point. I know they had to make room for the dGPU, but seeing such a small cell....bleh. My mechrevio has a 99wh battery in a nearly identical sized PC and it rocks, but I think clever motherboard design would have allowed asus to use a much bigger cell.
rc_nair104 - Friday, March 11, 2022 - link
For an average user who is not working on his laptop, oled shouldn't be a problem I think. After all an oled phone also has static elements and lasts many years isn't it?Oxford Guy - Sunday, March 13, 2022 - link
Most vaunted ‘content creators’ work on their machines… creating content.