Answer: Very.
Off the shelf notebooks never have any kind of decent screen configuration. Laptop giants are too busy focusing their buyers’ attention to the unnecessarily huge HDDs or the unnecessarily huge RAMs.
Most laptops these days have gloss finish screens. No matter how bright these screens are, they turn into mirrors with the introduction of even minimal ambient light.
Some things about the screen that most buyers don’t know till they see their laptops, [or maybe even after that :)] are:
LED vs CCFL:
LED: Light Emitting Diode
CCFL: Cold Cathode Fluorescent Tube
These are the two kinds of LCD lighting features. According to me, LED is much better as it gives crisper colours, has lower power consumption (meaning more battery life), higher brightness range, and lower dimming over time.
Gloss vs Matte:
This is the type of the finish of the screen. As I said gloss screens have this problem of turning into mirrors. Matte screens are better in ambient light but need to be kept very clean (from personal experience).
Making these two choices and getting my computer configured for this did cost me a few bucks more, but it has given its sweet rewards as I can now enjoy working on my computer without straining my eyes at any random place.
Note: I also use my computer with a blank white document opened at full brightness as a table lamp sometimes :)
