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Razer is set to unveil some cool new tech at CES this year but ahead of the show, it’s revealing new display innovations that it’s making for the Razer Blade 16 and Razer Blade 18 laptops. This includes OLED panels with fast refresh rates and high resolution in a large size. That’s on top of other details like minimized blurring, better sharpness, and deeper contrasts and colors.
Last year Razer officially announced the Blade 16 and Blade 18 at CES. However, Razer wasn’t alone as every other company seemed to be announcing their own new 16-inch and 18-inch gaming laptops. It truly was the year of gaming laptops with big screens. This year, Razer isn’t announcing gaming laptops with new screen sizes. Instead, it’s announcing a refresh to the Blade 16 and Blade 18 that come with display innovations that Razer is touting as “world firsts.”
Often this feels like a little bit of a buzzword. A way to make consumers take notice of what might be otherwise incremental changes. Even if they do happen to be the first time they were implemented. That isn’t the case with Razer’s new displays. As they genuinely sound like exciting advancements that will make the laptops that much better.
Razer Blade display innovations include a 240Hz OLED display
The big display change with the Blade 16 is the introduction of the new OLED panel. But not just any OLED panel, one that comes with a 240Hz refresh rate. Razer says this is the first 16-inch OLED to come with a 240Hz refresh rate and it should vastly improve the gaming experience. The display also features a VESA ClearMR 11000 certification. This should help to reduce the blurring on-screen during more fast-paced action sequences or any portion of a game that has a lot of movement. It’ll also help improve picture sharpness.
The panel will also be Calman Verified and display 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut. Because the screen will be OLED gamers should get really deep blacks and rich, vibrant colors. The Blade 18 meanwhile, will be the world’s first 18-inch display with 4K resolution and a 165Hz refresh rate. However, it’ll be LED and not OLED. It’ll feature the same DCI-P3 color gamut range as the Blade 16, as well as NVIDIA G-Sync support with a 3ms response time. In short, Razer is replacing the current Blade 18’s panel that’s QHD with a 240Hz refresh rate for the higher resolution 4K panel while dropping the refresh rate to 165Hz.
That’s the basic rundown of how the Blade 18 display is changing. Some might prefer the faster refresh rate of the current model. But 165Hz is still plenty fast for any game and you get 4K resolution on top of it. Not bad.
What to expect from the rest of the specs
Razer plans to do a full reveal of both laptops at CES next week. But chances are we’ll see some updated components beyond the display tech. It’s likely Razer will be using the latest NVIDIA 40-series GPUs inside these refreshes. And it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Intel’s new Core Ultra CPUs inside as well. As that seems to be a trend with laptops following Intel’s reveal of the new CPU family late last year. You can also likely expect varying sizes of storage capacity ranging from 512GB all the way up to 2TB. Likewise, these refreshed Blades should have RAM options up to 32GB like the current models.
Razer hasn’t confirmed any specs or other features just yet so any of this is simply speculation based on what’s already available. But it does make the most sense.