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
Comments Locked

69 Comments

View All Comments

  • TiGr1982 - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    Indeed, as a new buy, the unit with Kepler-based GTX 870M became instantly obsolete at the day of release of Maxwell-based GTX 970M.
    Only an uninformed buyer will buy this now. Or, alternatively, a large discount may help.
  • TiGr1982 - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    And 8 GB of RAM for this kind of pricing is not a good offer either.
  • Niavlys77 - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    Would be great to see a comparison to the Lenovo Y50 - I know it's 1080p screen is terrible, but I'm wondering how the 4k screen holds up to this IGZO panel.
  • Friendly0Fire - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    I'm fine with my current laptop (Asus UX51), but in a year or two I could see myself upgrading to this. Nvidia's Maxwell will probably make a significant difference on battery life and heat on a machine like this, so I'm excited to see the 2015 refresh.
  • dmunsie - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    For the gaming performance section, would it be possible to get the rMBP in there as well? Perhaps not OS X, since there is a lot not available on the OS X side. But certainly running Windows 8.1 would be doable and nice to know.
  • frostyfiredude - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    It has a GT750m, expect around 60% of the performance gotten by the 2013 Blade 14.
  • aferox - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    Would like to see this compared with the Gigabyte Aorus X3 Plus.
  • frelledstl - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link

    I just don't get the fascination with these higher than 1080p displays on a gaming notebook when the hardware just doesn't support that resolution with playable frame rates in newer games. At minimum if you are going to benchmark at 1080p, we need some kind of analysis on how the display handles scaling down to the lower resolution. 14 inches to me is the best size for a portable gaming laptop, but I can't help but think that something like the W230ss is just a better value for the money by far with its still nice 1080p IPS screen.. You can get a decent configuration of that for $1200-$1400 with a nice sized SSD and since the SS version is there 2nd gen version of that laptop, they have included some nice power optimization improvements. I think 2k-4k gaming is great, on a desktop that might stand a chance at actually providing decent frame rates at high detail settings.
  • XabanakFanatik - Sunday, October 12, 2014 - link

    I'll tell you from personal experience that I have played games accidentally set to 1080p and did not realize I was not at native resolution. A more thorough analysis of scaling would be nice, but I have no complaints.
  • synaesthetic - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    I raised this point myself but I noticed the non-standard resolution of 3200x1800. That's exactly four times 1600x900, which *is* a standard resolution. The performance figures at 1080p suggest that this laptop would run most games extremely well at 1600x900 and since the resolution is divisible four times into the native resolution, it shouldn't have any fuzziness or loss of sharpness from interpolation.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now