HP Stream 11 Review: A New Take On Low Cost Computing

Display

The rise of smartphones and tablets has dramatically changed the display landscape, with practically all tablets having In Plane Switching (IPS) displays. IPS offers much better viewing angles and color reproduction compared to the standard laptop displays that use a Twisted Nematic (TN) based LCD. There has been the start of a push to IPS panels on notebooks, but far too many are still burdened with TN. The lower the cost of the device, the higher the probability it will have a TN panel - Chromebooks included. The HP Stream is one of the lowest priced notebooks available and as such, it is saddled with a TN LCD, and not a very good one at that. But, with the price point it has achieved, we must set our sights a bit lower.

With a resolution of 1366x768, the HP Stream 11 has the standard “HD” resolution and 16:9 aspect ratio of almost all notebooks under $500, and once again with this price we should not be shocked or outraged. Compromises must happen to reach lower prices, and the display is almost always one of the first to go. With the 11.6” diagonal dimension, this display comes in at 135 pixels per inch, which is actually higher than the standard 96 DPI Windows was founded on. It is not high DPI by any means, but it is what is expected at this price point.

With a fairly low resolution, there is no need for any sort of strange pixel arrangement, and as such we have a standard RGB stripe. The display has a matte finish, which causes some subpixel distortion.

To evaluate our displays, we utilize a custom workflow in SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 software. To measure brightness and black levels, an i1Display Pro from X-Rite is used, and for color testing the X-Rite i1Pro spectrophotometer is leveraged.

The HP Stream 11 is not a very bright display, but at 220 nits it is fine for indoor use. The matte finish would help somewhat for outdoor viewing, but would still make for a poor experience. High black levels result in a very poor 356:1 contrast ratio, which is further hampered by the poor viewing angles of the TN TFT.

As you can see in the image, the blues in this display are ridiculously high, and the reds drop to nothing. This gives an absurd uncalibrated white point of 18363, when it should be as close to 6504 as possible. The grayscale accuracy is also far too high at 11.6.

When we perform our testing, we are targeting sRGB which is the standard color space for most web content. The HP Stream is not even close to the entire sRGB space, and the amount of drift on our saturation sweeps is very severe. The 100% blue and 100% red are both closer to the 80% mark than the 80% is, which makes the magenta very shifted and compressed. The overall score of 12.01 is very poor.

The colorchecker only confirms the bad news, with an overall score of 10.5. This panel is really poor. Not much more can be said. Calibration also did nothing for the display. It is difficult to calibrate a display to a particular color space when it cannot do the entire gamut. To have a standard, we calibrate to sRGB at 200 nits, and while the Stream 11 is bright enough for this, the LEDs are at practically maximum brightness which likely makes these results even worse.

We have been spoiled by an influx of high quality displays on devices lately. The HP Stream 11 does not continue this trend. It has a TN LCD which is quite terrible, and harkens back to the days of old. At the same time, some leeway should be given due to the price point of the laptop. Clearly HP had a $199 price point in mind and had to find savings to hit that price, and the LCD is always one of the first things on the chopping block. Still, this is even a poor display by poor display standards.