Display

The 2013 Razer Blade was a fine system, offering reasonable battery life, reasonable weight, and good gaming performance all in an attractive aluminum package. The one stand-out flaw was the display. 1600x900 was a reasonable resolution for the GPU in the device, but the quality of the TN panel was, well, atrocious. Razer has gone all out to correct this glaring flaw for this year, offering a stunning 14 inch panel from Sharp.

The 3200x1800 panel in the new Razer Blade is easily one of its defining features. It features 262 pixels per inch, and to counter the higher power draw required of high PPI panels, they have implemented an indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) thin film transistor (TFT) for the panel, which allows a full RGB stripe but keeps the power requirements of the backlight in check because the IGZO TFT is thinner than traditional amorphous silicon TFTs. Lower cost panels such as the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro use RGBW, with the white pixel to improve the transmission of light through the panel. IGZO is a better solution for image quality and color accuracy.

The 2013 Blade featured a twisted nematic (TN) panel, and it was far from the best TN panel available. It suffered from horrible viewing angles and very poor contrast. Luckily the new panel is either an in-plane switching (IPS) LCD or possibly Sharp's UV²A which is a form of ASV panel. There is not a lot of info out there for this exact panel, but the viewing angle problem is gone. IPS and MVA panels can be a bit slower than TN panels, but I did not notice any ghosting with this panel during gaming. Also, the new Blade features 10-point multi-touch.

High DPI panels have been discussed a lot, and while not every program is perfect on a high DPI windows laptop, the app gap has certainly closed. Major applications have taken a while to get updated, but we are now at the point where the benefits of a high DPI display outweigh the negatives. Google Chrome, long notorious for horrible high DPI support, has now been updated, and just recently Adobe has also updated their applications with high DPI support. Day to day use is no longer an issue, but if you still have an old program that will not run well on a high DPI display, there is always the option of lowering the resolution to 1600x900 (or even running at 1080p if you don't mind the non-integer scaling).

Moving on to display testing, let's look at the characteristics of this display and see how accurate it is out of the box as well as calibrated. This may not be a laptop designed for image professionals, but an accurate display is always good to have. Razer has gone to the length of including a default color profile for this laptop called Blade.icm. This should mean that some attention to detail was paid to the accuracy of the display, which is a good sign.

To test the display, we use the CalMAN 5 software suite with a custom workflow. An X-Rite i1 Display Pro is used for contrast readings, and an X-Rite i1Pro spectrophotometer is used to perform the grayscale and color accuracy.

Uncalibrated with default Blade.icm profile

Display - Max Brightness

Display - Black Levels

Display - Contrast Ratio

Razer rates the Blade at up to 400 nits of brightness, but the sample I received was not quite able to achieve that level even with the default profile bypassed. Still, 343 nits is a decent result and plenty bright for most environments. The black levels on the other hand are fantastic, which leads to one of the highest contrast ratios for any laptop we have tested.

Display - White Point

Display - Grayscale Accuracy

The white point is almost perfect out of the box. The grayscale is also excellent, though somehow the Yoga 2 Pro manages better with an RGBW display.

Display - Saturation Accuracy

The blue values are a bit oversaturated on the sweeps, but once again the Razer Blade has a fantastic result, basically tied with the Retina MacBook Pro for the best we have tested.

Display - GMB Accuracy

Display - Gamut Accuracy

Once again, the Razer Blade scores the best of any device we have tested.

This is an impressive display out of the box. The default color profile is excellent and the Razer Blade has basically the best display of any laptop we have tested. The one potential issue is the blue saturation is high, but it is a great result nonetheless.

As good as the display is with a default profile, we can still calibrate it using the CalMAN software to see if we can do better.

Calibrated

Calibrating for sRBG and Gamma 2.2, the results are nothing short of fantastic. Grayscale is an amazing 0.5177, the saturation drops to 1.1976 and GMB is 1.0426. The only issue is still with the blue being slightly oversaturated. 100% blue has a Delta E of around 5, but other than that the rest of the results are excellent.

The 2013 Razer Blade had an amazingly bad display, and it looks like Razer learned from that and not only did they put in a good display, they put in a fantastic display. At 262 PPI, it is higher density than the Retina MacBook Pro, and the panel delivers fantastic, colors, contrast, and grayscale out of the box.

Gaming Performance Battery Life, Temperatures, and Noise
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  • heybrandons - Monday, October 13, 2014 - link

    I agree, I've been using it as my primary computer for everything from work to play and it's been great. The only thing I can complain about is that they put the air intakes at the bottom; would have much preferred them on the sides so that they don't get block when sitting on my lap.
  • Connoisseur - Monday, October 13, 2014 - link

    I don't think that's going to change in future iterations, even with more efficient CPU/GPU combos. With the amoutn of power this draws, I don't see how a side intake could suck in enough air to cool all the components. I also don't mind the look. Very clean looking on all the visible surfaces.
  • kallogan - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    no maxwell in slim chassis = fail
  • Connoisseur - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    The 2014 Blade was released back in May. How do you propose they integrate Maxwell when the parts didn't exist yet? Razer is on a 1 year release cycle so I'd expect a Maxwell/Broadwell machine to come out April/May 2015.
  • Jon Tseng - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    Nice review but wasn't this machine released like, over six months ago??

    I know you take your time to get the most through reviews out there, but not much point reviewing it now. Especially as 970M notebooks are changing the whole purchasing decision all over again.

    By that rationale you should also be getting your Galaxy S5 review up soon, right? :-p
  • Yorgos - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    I bought a Y410p Lenovo 6 months ago:
    i7-4700 qm
    14" 900p
    replaced the 1TB hdd with a 150 CHF 840 PRO 256 GB
    w/ 3 years warranty
    somewhere 70 Wh battery
    Total price: 898.0 $ + 150 chf = 1050 $ (1 $ is nearly 1 chf)
  • Connoisseur - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    Why even list this machine? It's got a vastly inferior graphics card, screen and CPU. I'd understand if you're comparing value vs. build quality (although I think that's still a dumb comparison), but these two machines don't even share the same internals.
  • Kutark - Sunday, October 12, 2014 - link

    I just paid $1340 for an Acer VN7 Aspire Black Edition. Its just a hair less than 1/3" thicker, weighs about 2/5 of a lb more, has an IPS screen, 16gb Ram, 860m Maxwell, so it runs nice and cool and quiet. 256gb SSD, and is almost as good build quality. Now, before you go off, yes, Acer's traditionally had crap build quality, but go read the reviews, this thing is really well made. I can open the screen from the corner and it flexes maybe 1/3". Its very solid. The keyboard is amazing. Oh, and its literally half the price.
  • tipoo - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    There wasn't yet a full review of that Haswell 15" rMBP you had for comparison, was there?
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    No, there wasn't. That review was unfortunately canceled when Anand retired.

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