With bleeding-edge technology comes, on occasion, a few bumps in the road – and that's what Apple is finding out with its gorgeous, new 'tandem OLED' Ultra Retina XDR display on the new iPad Pro 13-inch.
It turns out that in some very specific instances, this sandwich OLED technology over-enhances some HDR content, particularly a certain shade of blue, which it turns, at least to our eyes, purple or chartreuse.
Our colleagues at iMore made this exclusive discovery, reporting that the "iPad Pro OLED display has a weird HDR highlights bug." They say that some shades of indigo and navy blue in HDR content are "blown out" and "appear almost white."
Apple has acknowledged the issue to iMore, and says it's prepping a software fix.
I'm a big fan of iMore but I didn't want to take their word for it, so I loaded up Netflix on my iPad Pro 13-inch test unit (Apple did not provide 11-inch Pro models for review) and hunted down the specific episode of Stranger Things they used to demonstrate this bug. Like dozens of other shows on one of the best streaming services, the show is presented in HDR (high dynamic range), which brings out extra detail in light and dark areas of the picture.
In Season 3, Chapter 5: Flayed of the popular streaming show, the intrepid kids are working their way through cavernous hallways under the Starcourt Mall. Villain-turned-hero Steve Harrington (played by Joe Keery) is wearing his Scoops Ahoy! employee uniform, which looks vaguely naval and is mostly dark blue.
Sure enough, in multiple scenes, Steve's uniform seems to come alive. In my viewing, there appear almost chartreuse squiggles dancing on the costume. It happens almost every time his uniform is in view, but doesn't affect any other character's costume.
It's an odd but not very distracting issue, and when I played through other HDR content, like Dead To Me and Lucifer, I couldn't recreate the effect.
This is what could best be described as an edge case, and it's no wonder Apple didn't catch it before shipping the 13-inch tablet this week.
As my TechRadar colleague Matt Hanson's notes in his iPad Pro 13-inch (2024) review, "The iPad Pro 13-inch (2024) is the best tablet Apple has ever made, and the company has clearly thrown everything at it." Among those things is the incredible new screen technology. In almost every aspect, the new iPad's Ultra Retina XDR display is an improvement over the mini-LED screen of the previous iPad Pro generation. Using it, I marvel at the inky blacks and unusually bright highlights.
Put another way, this minor issue, which could be resolved by the time you read this, is no reason not to choose the pricey but remarkable tablet if you already have your eyes on it.
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