Razer Blade 16 review: A miraculous display in a laptop you can probably skip

engadget.com:

The Razer Blade 16 is one of the most unique laptops we’ve ever seen – I just wish I could recommend it as easily as the Blade 15. It can handle 4K gaming just as well as high-speed 1080p gameplay, thanks to a dual-mode screen. And it’s one of the fastest notebooks around, featuring Intel’s latest CPUs and NVIDIA’s newest GPUs. And notably, it can be configured with an RTX 4090.

But all of that comes at a cost. It’s noticeably heavier than the Blade 15, and you’ll have to pay at least $3,300 to own one with the dual-mode display. It’s like Razer put another Razer tax on top of its already high prices.

For some, though, the cost will be worth it. The Blade 16’s MiniLED display can natively handle 4K+ 120Hz (meaning it can show up to 120fps gameplay), and 1080p+ 240Hz. You could always configure a 4K panel to scale down to 1080p or lower resolutions, but that usually leads to a muddy mess, and 4K screens are typically limited to 120Hz at best. What’s special about the Blade 16 is that it delivers those resolutions as sharply as standalone monitors.

According to Razer, the Blade 16’s dual-mode MiniLED technology was developed together with the display maker AUO. The screen is natively a 4K+ 240Hz panel that can sync pixels together to accurately scale down to 1080p, something that looks far better than typical downscaling. Razer says there’s no mobile GPU or data pipeline that can effectively deliver 4K at 240Hz, so that refresh rate is only possible in 1080p. (It’s still rare to find 4K 240Hz on desktop monitors, and even a 4090 would have trouble hitting 240fps at that resolution.)

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