The seven million pixels translates into 260 pixels per inch, making the display much sharper than the Surface Laptop 3 15 (which is right at 200 pixels per inch), so text is very crisp. It can also cause some letterboxing when watching 16:9 video, but unless that is all you are planning on doing on the Surface Book, it likely won’t be an issue. Thanks to the nearly seven million pixels on this panel, gaming at the native resolution, even with the GTX 1660 Ti, is not always possible, so having to fall back to 1920x1080 can be a hit or miss proposition. The one area where the 3:2 aspect can be a problem though is gaming, with some games counting on 16:9 aspect ratios. The industry took note, and we have all benefited, and more and more devices are shipping with taller aspect ratios, whether it be 3:2, or 16:10. The tablet capabilities have been promoted less over the years, but the 3:2 aspect they chose also tends to work very well for productivity tasks on a laptop computer. When Microsoft bucked the trend of 16:9 displays on Windows-based laptops, it was a big improvement to the tablet experience, since a 16:9 device works very poorly as a handheld display. The Surface Book team has also shown the importance of not only strong color accuracy and high resolution, but also high contrast ratios as well.

The Surface Book 3 offers the same display choices as the previous generation, with the 13.5-inch getting a 3000x2000 panel, and the 15-inch offering a 3240x2160 panel. Microsoft committed to display quality in a big way back with the launch of the original Surface Book in 2015, and have continued to deliver some of the best displays in the PC industry.

Microsoft surface book 3 13.5