Newest Razer Blade 16 is two times brighter than before for significantly improved HDR support

The 2025 Blade 16 was praised for its Samsung OLED panel supporting both G-Sync and a high native refresh rate of 240 Hz. As nice as it was, however, HDR support was curiously limited to just 500 nits or DisplayHDR500 whereas the OLED displays on many other high-end multimedia laptops (like those from the Asus series) can reach much brighter maximums. Razer has finally addressed this for the 2026 Blade 16 refresh by doubling the maximum HDR brightness to 1000 nits instead.

To confirm this, we enabled HDR on our 2025 and 2026 Blade 16 units and then ran the HDR brightness test on the maximum brightness setting. We were able to record a maximum brightness of 431 nits on the 2025 model whereas the 2026 model would reach 1020 nits according to our X-Rite colorimeter. Quality HDR is dependent on the brightness extremes between minimum and maximum and so the upgraded viewing experience is not insignificant when upgrading from DisplayHDR500 to DisplayHDR1000.

Unfortunately, 2025 Blade 16 owners are out of luck. While the 2025 and 2026 models both utilize similar Samsung OLED panels with the exact same refresh rate and native resolution, their panel names are different (ATNA60DL04-0 vs. ATNA60HU06-0). Any HDR-related software updates for 2025 model owners are therefore unlikely to ever happen.

More benchmarks and details can be found on our review of the 2026 Blade 16.