12.9-inch iPad Pro mini-LED display is as custom as its M1 SoC, but early issues have emerged

Apple likes to develop its own technologies where it can in order to differentiate itself from the competition. It’s custom A-series chips really stand out in this regard as being well ahead of the competition in many regards. The company’s latest Liquid Retina XDR display found in the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro model is no exception. Even though it isn’t the first mini-LED device to hit the market, it is the only to feature in-house Apple tech.

A new support document from the company explains some of the highlights of the new panel:

The 12.9-inch Liquid Retina XDR display has an IPS LCD panel supporting a resolution of 2732 by 2048 pixels for a total of 5.6 million pixels with 264 pixels per inch. To achieve Extreme Dynamic Range required an entirely new display architecture on iPad Pro. The all new 2D mini-LED backlighting system with individually controlled local dimming zones was the best choice for delivering the extremely high full-screen brightness and contrast ratio, and off-axis color accuracy, that creative professionals depend on for their workflows.

Additionally, custom algorithms run on the advanced display engine of the M1 chip, working at the pixel level to control the mini-LED and LCD layers of the display separately, treating them as two distinct displays. These proprietary algorithms coordinate the mini-LED and LCD layers across transitions to deliver the optimal visual experience. 

Apple, however, acknowledges that like other displays with local dimming zones, the new iPad Pro panel will display “a slight blur or color change while scrolling against black backgrounds,” which it calls “normal behaviour. However, there have been some users who have noticed that a display blooming effect is still noticeable even when not scrolling with whiter light bleeding out from behind colored areas against a black background. Apple hasn’t commented on these early reports, although it is possible that the mini-LED algorithm could be further tweaked in a future update to mitigate against this effect. On the plus side, early reports also indicate that the new iPad Pro display produces OLED-like truer blacks as promised.

Buy the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro with Liquid Retina XDR display from Amazon.