 Most people understand that while Apple does many things incredibly well and some things better than anyone else, they're usually not the first to do that thing. So it shouldn't be a big surprise that despite rumors for over a year now that Apple is moving to mini LED screens, the first laptop to feature one isn't a MacBook. Introducing the MSI Creator 17, a powerful mobile workstation with a 4k 1000-nit mini LED display complete with full array local dimming. How did they make this thing so thin? And how are we gonna learn about our sponsor, Elgato? From me. Elgato's new Wave 1 and 3 USB broadcast microphones are here. Use their Wave Link app to control your Wave mic and up to seven other audio sources and create independent mixes. Check them out today at the links below. What is a mini LED display? Well, most displays, especially thin ones like on a MacBook or other laptop, are edge lit. That means that their light originates from LEDs at the edge of the screen that are diffused and then reflected towards your eyes. The main drawbacks of this approach are that it's very difficult to spread the light out evenly, resulting in hot spots, and it also limits the contrast of the image. Then there's your direct LED displays where the lights are right behind the pixels shining through them, well, directly. This can address uneven lighting, but to improve the perceived difference between the darkest and brightest parts of a scene, manufacturers need to go one step further with a feature called full array local dimming. Here, the display can tune individual zones of these direct backlights depending on the scene, allowing an object like the moon to be bright without turning the entire screen into this gray and washed out mess. Mini LED, like on this laptop, takes this concept to the next level by enabling more and smaller dimming zones, increasing contrast and reducing the bloom or halo effect around bright objects. Now this puppy has 240 zones, which might not seem that impressive when you consider that there's TVs out there with between 500 and a thousand zones, but then you consider the density. On just a 17-inch display, each of those zones is under 2 centimeters wide. Now we've covered mini LED displays on this channel before, but they're usually found on thick desktop monitors, and the fact that this display made by AU Optronics has been integrated into a totally normal-looking laptop lid is pretty cool, or well, warm, because there's no cooling fans behind the backlight like we found in those chunky monitors. Honestly, I can accept it though considering we're getting a thousand nits of VESA display HDR certified brightness in a laptop form factor. That is a first. It also means we can expect a larger color volume than your typical creator laptop as it has wide coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut across more brightness levels, at least in theory. While the screen's color accuracy was decent in SDR mode, with HDR enabled, it's kind of all over the place, and that's because of, well, no real surprises here, Windows. Apparently with inbuilt displays like on a laptop, the HDR appearance varies according to both the brightness setting with your keyboard shortcut, and the HDR SDR balance setting in Windows. So you can end up with more detail in dark areas or more detail in light areas depending on where you place the slider. Unfortunately, nothing that we did to the slider got us to a place where we felt like we could trust the colors enough to create an HDR video on this thing, even if the specs look great on paper. In other more promising news though, firing up a movie or game or really any other kind of HDR content for consumption is a much better experience. I didn't find that, again, with some tuning of the Windows HD color slider, that the colors were so far off that I wasn't able to enjoy the content, and in fact, to my eye, without having a reference display side by side, it's not the kind of thing that I would notice. So even though we only managed 45 frames per second at the native 4K resolution in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, that's fair enough since it's a 60 Hertz panel anyway. There are four variants of this machine, each with a different GPU and storage configuration, but all of them are very capable with strong graphics cards and a 10th gen Core i7 Intel 10875H boosting up to 5.1 GHz. Ours put up very respectable numbers in the usual benchmarks and sports an RTX 2070 Super Max-Q, 32 gigs of DDR4 RAM, and 1 terabyte of NVMe storage. The two M.2 slots make storage easily upgradeable once you pass the chassis's 14 screws, but to max out your memory to 64 gigs, you are gonna have to peel off this huge amount of shielding, remove the motherboard, and replace the existing SODIMs with two 32 gig sticks, as there are only two sockets. But hold on a second, because last time we complained about this issue, MSI just flipped the whole motherboard over, which resulted in the Ethernet jack being on the mouse hand side. So... pick your poison, I guess? For video editing performance, we're using an in-house benchmark that we're calling Markbench, where we encode high resolution content with some basic effects and lumetri color using Premiere Pro. Our Creator 17 was able to do it in under eight minutes. A strong result. Speaking of strong, the I.O. offers a ton of flexibility for a laptop in 2020. On the left, you've got RJ45, one USB 3.2, a UHS3 micro SD card reader, and separate mic and headphone jacks. That is a nice inclusion for something that's focused on creators. And then on the right, you've got HDMI Thunderbolt 3 with 15 watts of power delivery, two more USB-A's, and a non-Thunderbolt USB Type-C that can carry DisplayPort, and deliver 27 watts of charging. Oh, and who could forget the battery reset pinhole? On that subject, MSI advertises seven hours of productivity, but our machine in PC Mark's office battery test measured just four and a half hours, and that's with the brightness turned down to 100 nits, which is pretty dim. With that said, this result isn't entirely unexpected, so road warriors need not apply here. The chassis has a sandblasted finish in a color MSI calls space gray, which apparently is not on Apple's trademark list. And like many an MSI laptop, it's a little on the flexy side. But that's kind of the trade-off of getting hardware as thin as possible in a package that's as light as possible. The trackpad is large with an integrated fingerprint reader, and very usable as far as PC trackpads go, although it can tend to get clicked by your right palm when you're typing, and the palm rejection only saves you some of the time. I mean, look at this. You can even register a click just by pressing on the chassis here. The typing experience is decent as long as you don't type like a triggered Karen. There's 1.9 millimeters of key travel, a full numpad, and normal arrow keys, so you shouldn't have much trouble getting up to speed right away. And this battery indicator light that you can still see when the lid's closed are deserving of a fatherly nod. Above the keyboard is a speaker grill that houses the world-class DynAudio sound system that frankly sounds very much like the crap you get on any ordinary laptop, and is a far cry from the actually decent audio coming out of the latest 16-inch MacBook Pro, which you might say, well, that's not fair. The MacBook Pro is so expensive. But so is this. Finally, there's the 720p webcam, which shares the forehead bar with IR gear for Windows Hello, alongside otherwise slim side bezels. So, subject to price, should you spend anywhere between $1,800 and $3,500 on this laptop? Not before hearing my top three gripes in ascending order. One, it's pretty loud. Not taking a whole lot of marks off here though, because it's designed to get stuff done first and foremost, and MSI seems to have put a lot of thought and effort into cooling this thing with three fans, seven heat pipes, and perforations on just about every side of the machine. So, it is what it is. Two, far less, exclusively, why does it have a micro SD card reader instead of a full-size one? It's much easier to convert down than up, and again, guys, this is supposed to be a mobile workstation. Finally, three, is this 1000-it HDR screen even necessary for you? For content consumption, actually, I get it. Movies and games look sweet on this thing, and there is nothing else like it on the market. But, this is not only supposed to be for creators, but creators on the go. And you square that with the fact that not that many people are making HDR content, the workflow to make it is complex and kludgy, the colors in HDR mode are less than trustworthy thanks to Windows, there's blooming, and there's a lack of the granular control that you get on an external monitor, and then suddenly all those things combine to make this product come off as early adoptery at best, and at worst, a marketing ploy to sell panels that really should have been on gaming laptops, except for, sorry guys, we couldn't make a high refresh rate one. So, I'm not not recommending this laptop. Like I said, there is nothing else like it. I'm just saying, if you're gonna buy it, buy it for the right reasons, because you want a capable SDR workstation laptop that's also great for watching HDR movies on your extremely long daily train commute. Speaking of commuting, the Massdrop Object 2 headphone amplifier, aka the O2 AMP, is really not very portable at all. The AMP was designed and created with feedback from over 500 Massdrop members, and serves as an ideal baseline reference amplifier powering everything from in-ear monitors to HD 800s. You can adjust the input, output, and power arrangement in two different gains, medium and standard, and it delivers big, clear, and accurate sound. Check it out at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy our recent video on the future of TVs that takes a bit of a deeper dive than usual into the display technology that's gonna be powering your big screen home movie watching experience for the next few years. And actually, probably more than that.