Microsoft uses a Mini-LED display in the new Surface Laptop Ultra that is extremely bright at up to 2,000 nits, but lacks local dimming and suffers from slow response times.
Andreas Osthoff (translated by Andreas Osthoff), Published 🇩🇪
The Surface Laptop Ultra is Microsoft's new high-end laptop, equipped with the new Nvidia RTX Spark N1X processor. Unlike its competitors, Microsoft uses a 15-inch Mini-LED display with a 3:2 aspect ratio, staying true to its previous Surface laptops. Despite impressive specifications such as a high resolution, a 120 Hz refresh rate and a high contrast ratio, the screen turns out to be its biggest weakness in practice.
The first major issue, immediately noticeable during use, is clearly visible ghosting, even in 120 Hz mode. This is caused by the IPS panel's slow response times (a Mini-LED screen uses a regular IPS panel, but with a different backlight).
The second major issue is the lack of local dimming. A Mini-LED backlight consists of many lighting zones that can be switched off completely depending on the content being displayed, allowing for extremely low black levels. However, we could not find a way to enable local dimming on the Surface Laptop Ultra, so its display characteristics are those of a regular IPS panel. This includes the high black level, which results in a significantly lower maximum contrast ratio and makes black content look rather gray.
Despite the excellent brightness (1,000 nits in SDR and 2,000 nits in HDR), the subjective image quality is therefore significantly worse than that of competitors such as the Asus ProArt P16 with its excellent 4K tandem OLED panel or the Apple MacBook Pro 16 with its Mini-LED panel.
We can only hope that Microsoft will at least fix the local dimming issue with a software update. However, there is no solution to the hardware's slow response times. All in all, the Surface Laptop Ultra's new Mini-LED display is a real disappointment. We are also currently in contact with Microsoft about these issues and will update the review if any new information becomes available.
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I grew up with modern consumer electronics and my first computer was a Commodore C64, which encouraged my interest in building my own systems. I started working as a review editor for Notebookcheck during my dual studies at Siemens. Currently, I am mainly responsible for dealing with business laptops and mobile workstations. It’s a great experience to be able to review the latest devices and technologies and then compare them with each other.
Andreas Osthoff, 2026-10-22 (Update: 2026-10-22)