The iPad Air Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 29, 2013 9:00 PM ESTDisplay
In building the iPad Air Apple shrunk all elements of the tablet’s design, including the thickness of the display. We’re still dealing with a 9.7-inch 4:3 2048 x 1536 IPS LCD panel with true RGB stripe rather than some weird subpixel structure. Viewing angles are still great, and overall the display remains the best you can get at this size.
The iPad Air continues Apple’s recent history of shipping color calibrated displays. Color accuracy on my iPad Air review sample is better than on any previous iPad I’ve ever tested, in fact it’s more accurate than any other tablet I’ve ever tested. The numbers are easily backed up by images that show a vibrant and, more importantly, accurate display.
The iPad Air gets pretty bright at 426 nits, although black levels aren’t all that impressive at 0.44 nits. Overall contrast ratio is in line with what we’ve seen from previous iPads. My only complaint on the display front is I would like to see Apple laminate the cover glass to the LCD display. Reducing reflections would go a long way towards improving the usability of the device, not to mention the impact that would have on improving display quality in dark movie scenes.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
444 Comments
View All Comments
dishayu - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I agree on one tiny point with you. The shortcomings of a device need to be highlighted when it comes out... NOT when the successor is launched. And I've read AnandTech long enough to know that this is not just a problem with Apple reviews. This is the problem with all reviews... Android, PC and storage reviews and so on... As soon as a refresh/next gen product is launched, the previous gen suddenly develops issues/shortcomings. Don't get me wrong, their reviews are still the best and more in-depth than rest of the internet combined, but they seriously need to address this little issue.BlakKW - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
pretty valid observationerrorr - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I'm not sure people really understand the shortcomings when a product comes out. I appreciate when Anand or Brian use a product for a while and their insights are far superior, but initial impressions on a review are still subject to change gradually.KoolAidMan1 - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
How dare a company improve the performance of its productsandroticus - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
When is that MacBook Pro review coming???? :)FwFred - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Yep, much more excited about that from a device standpoint, though the A7 investigaton was interesting.tipoo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Woah, the Surface charges fast.MarcSP - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Yeah. Ii is not just a little bit, it is half the time! Of course the review somehow tries not to make it look as a really negative thing or at least something to really improve for the next iPad. In fact it says it is GOOD, compared to ipad 3 and 4, that were ludicrously slow in charging.Of course, in the Surface 2 review there was no mention at all of this fast charging, only of the "average battery life".
And BTW I think battery life in Surface 2 should be retested. It is extremely weird that it got less web browsing time than Surface 1 (and that this discrepancy was not even mentioned in the review). If possible use a different Surface 2 device, just in case it had some problem.
YuLeven - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
And other sites got 14 hours of battery when testing the Surface 2.basroil - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
" The iPad Air crashed a couple of times on me (3 times total during the past week), but no where near as much as earlier devices running iOS 7.0.1. "Not a single W8 device I own has ever crashed from system memory issues (one crashes because the GPU was overclocked too hard and graphics memory suffered from it, but that's hardware failure not software)