TCL has just given us a glimpse of the future at SID Display Week 2026 in Los Angeles, and it looks like future laptops could be getting even longer battery life thanks to a new display technology.
Their display division, China Star Optoelectronic Technology (CSOT), turned up with a 14-inch Oxide LCD panel that takes the idea of variable refresh rates and turns it up or rather, down to eleven. While we are used to smartphones switching refresh rate to as low as 1Hz to save battery, this new screen can drop all the way to a staggering 0.01Hz.
That effectively means the display only needs to refresh once every 100 seconds when you are looking at something static like a Word document or your desktop. But the real magic is something they are calling Adaptive Partition Refresh, or ARR. Instead of forcing the entire screen to run at one speed, it can chop the panel into sections. You could have a silky-smooth 120Hz video playing in one corner while the rest of the screen sits at that ultra-low 0.01Hz.
It is clever stuff involving row-level partitioning and integrated circuits that manages to avoid the flickering issues often associated with low frequencies.
According to TCL, this tech can cut screen power consumption by half, which is a massive win for portability and battery life.
TCL told PCMag that the technology is apparently production-ready right now, though the company is currently realising that they cannot go it alone. They need to collaborate with the likes of Microsoft, Intel, and AMD to ensure the software and processors can actually handle this level of granular control.
It is a bit of a waiting game for now, but the prospect of a laptop that lasts significantly longer on a single charge is definitely something to keep an eye on.