Backlight Bleed on 5k iMac - Worth repairing?
Hi all,
I’ve noticed whenever I’m on a black screen or watching a letterboxed film that my 27” Retina iMac has some backlight bleed at the top/right of screen. I’ve included a couple of photos below - one taken with the screen at full brightness and the other at about half brightness. I’ve had a look online and it seems I’m not the only one with this problem as many others have come across the very same issue (to varying degrees) on their machines. From what I can gather it seems that most, if not all, Retina iMacs have some amount of backlight bleed as it’s symptomatic of LCD technology. Regardless, it’s very distracting whenever you’re watching a wider than 16:9 film or playing any games that have a lot of dark scenes. Heck, you’re even drawn to it when the machine is booting up and it’s just downright annoying to see such a beautiful 5K screen tarnished by this ugly anomaly. Considering I’ve payed top dollar for a full spec unit it’s very disappointing to say the least.
I spoke to the reseller that I bought mine from and they said their service department is happy to order in a new screen and swap it out. This is something that I’m considering doing but I thought I’d first get some opinions on the matter here. Do you think the bleed is so bad that it warrants a changeover? To those of you with 5k iMacs how bad is the backlight bleed on your machine? I’m a little hesitant about going through with it as I’ll probably end up with a replacement screen with worse bleed than what I originally had! The reseller said that Apple quality control is very good and that I’d receive a perfect screen but unfortunately I’m *very* dubious of this claim.
Also is there any chance that when the repair agent puts the machine back together after doing the job that it could end up getting dust, and who knows what else, trapped between the screen and the front glass? If this were to happen it could end up looking worse than the original bleed issue! I suppose that opening up an otherwise perfectly good iMac to the elements can't ever be a good thing... has anyone here had any bad experiences with sloppy repair jobs?
Look forward to hearing back with any opinions on what I should do.
Thanks in advance!
iMac with Retina 5K display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2), 4 Ghz Core i7, 16 GB RAM DDR3, AMD R9 M295X