Is this normal for a 9560 4K screen?

Hey guys, I recently sprang for an XPS 15 with the UHD screen for all that nice colour accuracy, but there's a noticeable difference between the two sides of the screen. The left side has a warmer, yellower white, and the right side is slightly darker, with a cooler blue cast

It's subtle, but it's definitely visible - on the Dell forums, the background on either side of the posts looks like two different shades of grey. It's really hard to capture with a camera, but I took a pic and did some samples in Photoshop to show the variation


Obviously the screen looks weird (the brightness variation isn't anything like that bad in real life) but you can see the inconsistency - the right side is a little dimmer and bluer

So is this normal? Can you expect to see a slight colour shift on this panel? I know you can get backlight variation but this is meant to be a really colour-accurate screen, my cheap desktop monitor is more consistent. An engineer swapped the display out but the new one looks exactly the same (except now there's some lint under the glass )

 

There's this and this that can help you check your displays for issues like back light bleeding. For things like uneven back light brightness, it could just be the panel itself.
For example, under the Display section of the Dell XPS 15 9560 review, the 1/9th of the screen is much brighter than another section.

 

I'd wager it's likely backlight bleed and that's pretty common on this device.

 

Thanks for the replies!

I've looked at a black screen in the dark and there's bleed in the corners, it's stronger on the right side but it's not massive or anything. Would that cause problems on a completely white screen? It feels like that's when it should matter the least

The right side looks slightly darker and has this cooler cast, it's gradual but you can definitely see the difference past the middle of the screen. Some other patches look a little darker and there's a glow around the edges too (I have a grey background right now and I can see the unevenness, like the screen is dirty). The general impression it gives is that the left side has a spotlight on it, and the right is slightly fading into shade - it almost feels like a bad viewing angle. Although there is a fair bit of colour shift (darker, bluer) when I move my head to the side slightly...

Really I just want to know if this is normal, this is my first laptop and there was a lot of hype about this UHD screen, so maybe I'm expecting too much? The replaced screen looks exactly the same to me. I just want to make sure I'm not getting stuck with a faulty display, these things ain't cheap!

 

If this is new complain and ask for a new laptop.

 

While the screen is definitely overhyped to all hell, I'd ask Dell for another replacement. If it's the same, then I guess return the whole laptop for an Alienware OLED or MBP (if you need good colour accuracy).

 

Yeah it's brand new, and I don't have any real laptop experience to compare it to. If it's just how these XPS 4K screens are then that's one thing, if they're usually better then I don't want to return it without seeing it with a 'proper' screen, y'know? I really like it otherwise, it just has some issues that I was hoping were bad luck and replaceable.

Really I just wanted to dip into the forum expertise and hear "yeah you get some glow and colour/brightness inconsistency with these" or "mine doesn't have those issues" so I have an idea of what to expect, so if Dell says "it's normal" I know if that's true or not

Also (this might be a stupid question!) I know the response times aren't great on these displays, but should it be really visible? Like I was just watching a few HD Youtube videos, anything moving (even slowly) was reallllly visibly blurring, basically nothing looks sharp unless it's still. Movies look all right but they have that low framerate motion blur anyway

 

Yeah, ghosting is a problem with the XPS screens. That part is normal.

 

Hmm thanks, that's not exactly great. It's worse than I was expecting anyway!

 

Ive had this same problem on most of my 4k XPS 15s. I will not buy them site unseen now.

 

This shouldn't be 'normal' of course, but alas, it seems pretty common on this laptop. Mine was noticeably green on the left and pink on the right. I asked for an exchange and the new unit is much better (not just the uniformity, the colors in general). I reported it on reddit.
As for the response time ("ghosting"), I decided I could live with it even though it's definitely below average...

 

All right, thanks for the feedback all y'all! I haven't had a laptop before and it's hard to know what to expect, so this is really helpful. I got a third panel and it has the same inconsistency, at least I know it's a common issue now