82 PCWorld DECEMBER 2019REVIEWS LENOVO IDEAPAD S340-15IWL
pleasingly thin but a tad heavy.
The laptop’s Platinum Gray
shell (Abyss Blue is another
color option) looks plain yet
stylish, with a flat, featureless
lid save for a small Lenovo logo
on the side.
Open the lid and you’ll
find the 15.6-inch display with
slim side and top bezels,
although the bottom bezel is
somewhat fatter. The grey
keyboard and palmrest are unremarkable,
although it’s worth noting that the power
button sits just above the top-right corner of
the numeric keypad, making it much less likely
that you’ll press it by accident.DISPLAY
Bargain laptops often come with cheap
displays. While this $510
(when it’s on sale)
configuration of the S340
barely qualifies as a bargain
laptop, its iffy display certainly
falls into the cheap category.
While we are talking a
full-HD (1920x1080) display
here rather than the fuzzier
1366x768 you see in many
sub-$500 laptops, the S340’s
screen brightness tops out at
an anemic 205 nits (or
candelas) according to ourreadings. We generally prefer a laptop display
to have a 100-percent display brightness
reading of at least 250 nits, and we consider
200 nits to be barely adequate for
comfortable indoor viewing.
A bigger problem than brightness,
however, is the cheaper TN (twisted nematic)
panel technology it uses, which (as we notedThe TN display on this particular configuration of the Lenovo IdeaPad
S340 suffers from poor viewing angles.The Lenovo IdeaPad
S340-15IWL’s design
is plain, yet sleek.