Let’s Talk About The 12.9" iPad Pro Display.
The Liquid Retina XDR display on the new 12.9” iPad Pro is cool. From a conceptual standpoint and from a technical standpoint it is really impressive but is it really what it seems to be?
Let’s take a look.
The Liquid Retina XDR display is basically an IPS LCD display but replaces the backlight with 10,000 mini LEDs. To put it into context, the $4,999 Pro Display XDR only used 576 LEDs but to be fair those are blue LEDs which should make a difference.
So what’s the point of using mini LEDs?
There are 2 benefits of using mini LEDs on the iPad Pro 12.9”.
- Improved brightness;
- Improved contrast.
Improved Brightness
Improved brightness, I believe, doesn’t need much explanation. It’s just brighter. The benefit of a brighter display is that it’s easier to use the iPad Pro when under direct sunlight. This wouldn’t matter if you are using the iPad Pro at home (aren’t we all?).
Another benefit of a brighter display is that brighter displays look better. Personally, I like really bright displays. If possible, I would always run my iPhone at high brightness levels but I’m limited by the older battery in my iPhone. Sigh….
Improved Contrast
Contrast is the more interesting thing to talk about when looking at mini LED displays. The Liquid Retina XDR display (these names are getting ridiculous…) on the iPad Pro has better contrast ratios because you turn off or vary the levels of brightness of the backlight. In the case of the 12.9” iPad Pro there are 2,596 local dimming zones. This means the iPad can produce truer blacks despite using an IPS LED display.
As a result, you can better see how your videos are letterboxed. Erm…, I mean you won’t see the letterboxing. That doesn’t sound right.
Erm….
The display will meld into the bezel when watching videos. That’s awesome. Gray letterboxing when watching videos on an iPad is really annoying.
Special effects and images in HDR content will look better on the Liquid Retina XDR display. Because of the higher contrast you can expect the content to punch more or in other cases look truer to life. Of course, it isn’t better than an OLED display but it will be way better than a normal IPS display.
[(Edited: 5 June 2021) HDR content will look crisper and truer to life as the environmental lighting decreases. If the environment you are in is very bright, than the display difference between the older iPad and the newer iPad will be nearly unnoticeable]
However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
There are certain situations where the mini LED display will perform in exactly the same way as a normal IPS LED display. That is, when you are dealing with text. The mini LEDs are not small enough to only light up or turn off for individual characters. So, you won’t see true blacks for text on a white page nor true blacks for the background when there is white text on a black page.
[(Edited: 5 June 2021) My predictions here are wrong. Apple will display white text on a true black background. The result is that, there is noticeable glow around white text and white UI elements on black backgrounds. The halo becomes more noticeable as you increase the brightness of the display.]
When there is white text on a black page you can’t turn on the LEDs to light-up individual characters because that will create a halo around the text. Which personally, is even more annoying than a grayish background.
[(Edited: 5 June 2021) Here’s one more nitpick. There is a larger gap between the display and the cover glass on the iPad with the mini LEDs. This means the image will appear a little further from your finger, I hope you get what I mean. This is a little hard for me to describe.]
Conclusion
The Liquid Retina XDR display on the 12.9” iPad Pro is great for watching and editing multimedia content. Things like videos and pictures will look great. What’s not so great is that text will basically look the same on 11” and 12.9” iPad Pros.
So if, unlike me, you don’t watch way too much YouTube and work mostly with text, the Liquid Retina XDR display will not matter.
[(Edited: 5 June 2021) Oh one more thing, the mini LED display used on the newer 12.9" iPad Pro consumes significantly more power when displaying a white page when compared to the older 12.9" iPad Pro. 20 watts vs 9 watts.]
[IEdited: 20 July 2021) The 12.9" iPad Pro is limited to SDR only when used in Sidecar mode. (Source: Max Tech)]
