Backlight Bleed Test — Black Screen + Judging Notes

Plate IV — black fieldready

Tap for fullscreen black

Do this in a dim room with brightness at your normal level — not maxed. Maxed brightness makes every panel look guilty.

Three glows that get confused

IPS glow — a silvery sheen at the corners that moves when your head does. Lean left, it shifts; view dead-on, it fades. That's the panel technology, not a defect, and every IPS screen has some.
Backlight bleed — light leaking past the panel's edges, usually as bright patches along the border. It stays put no matter where your head is. Small amounts are normal at this price-of-physics; large blotches are assembly pressure and worth a return.
Clouding — irregular bright patches in the middle of the screen, like a smudged window. Shows most on the grey sweep. Persistent clouding on a new panel is the strongest return case of the three.

Photographing it without lying

Phone cameras exaggerate bleed dramatically — a long exposure in a dark room turns a whisper of glow into a floodlight, which is why forum photos look apocalyptic. If you're documenting for a return: set the phone's exposure down until the image matches what your eyes see, shoot from arm's length, straight on, and include a moment of the room in frame so the lighting is verifiable. A fair photo is more convincing to a support agent than a dramatic one, because they've seen ten thousand dramatic ones.

The 5% grey trick

True black tells you about the backlight; the 5% grey chip above tells you about uniformity at the darkest levels a movie actually uses. Streaming shadows sit around that level, so if the grey field looks even, your panel will handle dark scenes better than the black test alone can promise. OLED owners: your black screen is genuinely off — no bleed possible, and the grey chips are the only informative ones here.