Razer Blade 16 Mini-LED local dimming

If your laptop is under their one year warranty still, I would contact them and let them know about the issues with your device. Their warranty clearly states that if you make a valid claim, they will either replace the device or give you a refund. 
 

From my experience with Razer support, you have to pester them a bunch of times, even if they try to pull some BS about how you aren’t eligible. I’ve been told three times now that I am out of luck with repairs or replacements, but after I told them how it was unacceptable and clearly an issue on their end, they reached out to escalate the case yet again. at the moment, I think they will be giving me a 2024 blade 16 in exchange for my 2023 with problems. However, I’m sure they’ll be able to give you a refund if you’d rather.

this will take some time, but you’ll come out ahead of where you’d be if you just sold the device. People who do their research will probably see these issues with the 2023 models and not want to buy them for as much.

If your laptop is under their one year warranty still, I would contact them and let them know about the issues with your device. Their warranty clearly states that if you make a valid claim, they will either replace the device or give you a refund. 
 

From my experience with Razer support, you have to pester them a bunch of times, even if they try to pull some BS about how you aren’t eligible. I’ve been told three times now that I am out of luck with repairs or replacements, but after I told them how it was unacceptable and clearly an issue on their end, they reached out to escalate the case yet again. at the moment, I think they will be giving me a 2024 blade 16 in exchange for my 2023 with problems. However, I’m sure they’ll be able to give you a refund if you’d rather.

this will take some time, but you’ll come out ahead of where you’d be if you just sold the device. People who do their research will probably see these issues with the 2023 models and not want to buy them for as much.

Not sure if I’m eligible to join since they replaced my device with a working one, but I never signed anything saying I wouldn’t come after them. 
 

I would gladly join in hopes of some compensation for my time wasted.

Tell them you are severely disappointed in their service and if Razer will not resolve the matter you will be pursuing legal action in order to resolve it.

We need to get a lawyer on this, I am sure we would be able to do it without any upfront costs, just pay them out of the proceeds. Unless someone wanted to pay the upfront cost, that is.

Want me to leave a new comment when I get to start? I’m calling a few lawfirm to get this started

Sorry for the long post/rant, but I thought I'd share my experiences with getting a replacement. Maybe it'll help anyone still pursuing one.

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Razer ended up replacing my 2023 Blade 16 with a 2024 Mini-LED model after, to put it nicely, they did a less than adequate job with my 2023 Blade 16 RMA. Like many in this thread and forum, I was unsatisfied with the BOE panel, and I requested an AUO panel replacement from Razer. After much pushing and prodding, a CS rep eventually agreed to initiate an RMA for an AUO panel replacement. Unfortunately, my laptop came back with a significantly worse (somehow) BOE panel and excessive physical damage.

The replacement BOE panel was really quite poorly behaved—I measured a black-to-white transition time of ~700 ms (no, not a typo), which rendered the display wholly unusable. Eventually, Razer did a recall repair, and I found out that the repair center has "consumed the [AUO] parts required to repair your unit with no foreseeable date for parts supply." I was offered a one-to-one 2023 Blade 16 replacement. 

I was rather reluctant to receive another laptop with a BOE panel, so I asked for assurances that would not happen again. Someone from the Razer USA Repair Operations Laptops Specialist team reached out and offered to do a "white glove" panel confirmation of the replacement unit at their Irvine office. Online anecdotal evidence suggests that all Blade 16 units manufactured from mid-2023 onward use BOE panels, and I questioned how Razer would proceed if they found my replacement with BOE; I suggested a one-to-one 2024 replacement unit instead as a pragmatic solution. They were okay with that, but wanted me to pay a relatively hefty sum to account for the price difference between what I paid for the 2023 model and the 2024 MSRP for a spec downgrade.

Communication with the repair operations laptop specialist got cut off there, and I was rather appalled by that offer, so I declined anyways. I got passed around to a few different teams for a while until the Repair Operation Laptop Specialist got back to me and confirmed that the one-to-one 2023 Blade 16 replacement unit had a BOE panel. They ended up apologizing for my experiences and gave me a 2024 Blade 16 as a replacement at no charge.

Between my initial outreach and receiving the 2024 replacement in hand, this whole process took around 2 months with ~130 emails exchanged back and forth. Nearing the end, I was on the verge of taking Razer to small claims court and was getting ready to send them a letter stating my intentions to sue. I didn't have to go down that route as Razer offered me the 2024 replacement before I had an opportunity to send them the letter.

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I purchased my 2023 Blade 16 from (US) Amazon, and on the product page, there's a banner that advertises the display as "AMLCD Powered by AUO." Razer's (US) 2023 Blade 16 product page also takes you to that Amazon page. For the most part, I used that as a central point in my messages of bait and switch and false advertisement, alongside general incompetence and negligence. I was genuinely frustrated with how Razer let the BOE panel ship in their laptop and proceeded to do nothing about it for nearly an entire product cycle, so I don't think I was too far off the mark with the incompetence and negligence. I'm not sure how anyone at Razer looked at the panel, assuming they even went that far, and thought, "Yeah, that's totally fine. Ship it!" 

The panel is, IMO fairly obviously, problematic and flawed in a way that's unsuitable for daily use, let alone the advertised purposes of content creation. I don't want to rant too much here, as those reading this comment likely already know what I'm talking about, but the only thing the BOE panel is consistent at is being inconsistent. I provided about 20 different pictures and videos in a Google Drive folder and implored the CS reps to take a look at them and tell me the panel behavior is acceptable.

Like many on this forum, I received promises of a firmware fix, but I heavily leaned on the aspect of their promises being empty when they've been promising the same thing for nearly a year and not delivering. Until Razer explicitly acknowledges the BOE panel issues and provides a concrete date for the fix to me, I do not consider waiting to be an acceptable solution. Honestly, I don't think my arguments got me anywhere as Razer adopts a universal caseload CS management system instead of assigning an individual staff member to a case—all previous context is lost after 2 exchanges, and I've received the same canned responses more times than I can count. I got nowhere with CS until they butchered my initial RMA and escalated the recall repair. It's needlessly frustrating. Maybe others will have better luck with the “AMLCD Powered by AUO” angle if purchased from (US) Amazon.

Right before Razer sent the 2024 replacement, I received an apology for Razer "not been able to fulfill our expectations held in our warranty agreement." While I never explicitly brought up their warranty terms and conditions, I alluded to their actions not aligning with what's stated under their "Remedies under this Limited Warranty" section. As a result, the Repair Operations Laptops Specialist got approval for a 2024 Blade 16 which should have “the previously advertised AUO panel” (spoiler, it does not). Also, not once did Razer CS acknowledge that the BOE panel is problematic or provide a date for a fix.

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As for the 2024 replacement unit I received, it has the same BOE BOE0B90 panel as the 2023 variant, along with all the local dimming quirks and issues. The date of manufacture on this panel is Week 30, 2022, as per HWiNFO64. Internal Razer assembly part tracking stickers have a November 2023 date on the panel ribbon cable. There was a BOE firmware update released for the 2024 Blade 16 in (IIRC as I can't find the webpage atm) February 2024 to address display flickering, but that did nothing to change the local dimming behavior. 

Fortunately, the option to disable local dimming works reasonably well and turns the panel into (just) a good IPS one. Unfortunately, some of the issues intrinsic to the BOE panel persist with local dimming disabled, namely the relatively poor LED matching from the factory (or it could be a limitation of their LED backplane/edge case in uniformity compensation). The issue is exacerbated under 10% brightness (HDR off), as you'll be able to (more easily) distinguish between how the LED zones are partitioned and the zones themselves. There’s a post a few pages back by someone working at an “LCD display manufacturing company” in Korea discussing the optical sheets in the panel and I cannot agree more with their points.

The backlight behavioral distinction between HDR on and HDR off remains, observably, the same on the 2024 BOE implementation: HDR on prioritizes luminance stability at the expense of a larger blooming amplitude, and HDR off prioritizes blooming minimization at the expense of crushed shadow detail. These are just pitfalls with having a limited amount of dimming zones, but I wish Razer/BOE handled the behavior better, or like Asus, offered the user options. Horizontal banding artifacts, like ripples, are present on the 2024 BOE panel—that is clearly an unintended consequence of their local dimming algorithm, otherwise we’d have vertical artifacts too. Particularly annoying, especially when coupled with the backlight delay on the order of 100s of milliseconds (seriously how is it so bad?) in certain circumstances, such as HDR gaming or HDR content consumption.

On the bright side, there are a couple of welcome additions to the Razer Synapse display tab. There's a calibration report present, seems like they calibrated to Display-P3 and Power 2.2 Gamma at the factory, along with the option to switch the display between Native, DCI-P3 (default), Adobe RGB, Rec. 709, and sRGB. I haven't had an opportunity to validate these profiles with my colorimeter, but perceptually, they seem fine with the appropriate primaries and EOTF tracking. Probably in the realm of good enough for casual use. Also with the option to disable local dimming, you can properly calibrate the display.

I should note that there's a weird intermittent brightness flickering behavior on my laptop display that appears nearly identical to the flicker you get when enabling or disabling local dimming. I can't tell whether it's a bug or a hardware defect, but either way, I'm not looking forward to having to deal with it.

All in all, the BOE display is generally fine with the option to disable local dimming enabled. The local dimming implementation itself is still problematic, and it's frustrating to see how Razer lets these issues, IMO most of which are probably fixable via a firmware update, persist across two product generations. I can’t say I’m completely happy with the display, but it is better—even if by virtue of a band-aid solution in disabling local dimming.

Sadly. There were a few points in time where I was seriously contemplating and weighing my options of straight-up suing Razer in small claims court (a US thing) instead of continuing to engage with their frontline customer service, especially towards the end of the 2 month mark. I wanted to exhaust customer service avenues before resorting to legal action, but it was rather frustrating at times.

In retrospect, I’m kind of glad I stuck around the customer service route and resolved my issue amicably. They ended up shipping me an upgrade from my previous 2023 Blade 16, and while I didn’t ask for it, it’s a pleasant outcome.

Sorry for the long post/rant, but I thought I'd share my experiences with getting a replacement. Maybe it'll help anyone still pursuing one.

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Razer ended up replacing my 2023 Blade 16 with a 2024 Mini-LED model after, to put it nicely, they did a less than adequate job with my 2023 Blade 16 RMA. Like many in this thread and forum, I was unsatisfied with the BOE panel, and I requested an AUO panel replacement from Razer. After much pushing and prodding, a CS rep eventually agreed to initiate an RMA for an AUO panel replacement. Unfortunately, my laptop came back with a significantly worse (somehow) BOE panel and excessive physical damage.