Misunderstanding of Laptop Screen Model Numbers

Contrary to popular belief, most of the time, the laptop screen that is fitted inside your laptop is not made by the laptop manufacturer. If you take a popular brand like Sony for example, and dis assemble the laptop, you'll find that the screen inside it will most likely be made by Sharp, Chunghwa or Chi Mei, the hard disk drives usually by Toshiba, Seagate or Western Digital and so on and so forth.

The main reasons for this, is that these components, such as LCD screens and hard disk drives are complicated to manufacture and require extensive investment and specialist knowledge and conditions to manufacture. Because of this, there are only around 11 main manufacturers of laptop screens worldwide, mostly in Asia and of these around 5 or 6 are used in most laptops.

Whilst it is true to say a few laptop makers do also produce laptop screens, such as Toshiba and Samsung, they often do not fit their own screens to their own laptops, usually because the laptop manufacturing side of their business is completely separate to the screen manufacturing side of their business and ironically it's often cheaper for them to buy screens from others.

AU Optronics is one of the most widely used brands inside all major laptop models, alongside LG Philips and Chunghwa. Samsung, Toshiba and Sharp screens are used alongside Chi Mei, however less often.

Why are you telling us this?

The trend for self repair has risen in recent years, mainly due to the provision of DIY instruction manuals and videos online, and the demystifying of technical information. Users are finding that laptop screen replacement is actually a very simple task and have been going off to buy a replacement screen themselves rather than sending their laptop back to the manufacturer for repair which has risks, expenses and long repair times.

As users have become more technically Savvy, they have change in trend from searching for a replacement screen for their laptop by laptop make and model and started to box clever and search for the laptop screen's model number instead. You know the old story of a little information being dangerous :)

There is a common mis conception that the screens are made by the laptop makers, and so people armed with this incorrect information are searching for the wrong thing, and of course finding nothing.

The reason we want you to understand this, is that we collect internet search data and analyse it, and recently there has been a large amount of searches for incorrect products, and users are failing to find what they need, so we would like to help with this situation.