Anand Lai Shimpi, AnandTech:

Although Surface RT only ships with a 1366 x 768 panel, Microsoft was quick to point out that there’s more to dis­play qual­ity than pure resolution.

That’s what you say when you don’t have enough pix­els, but he does have a point.

Surface’s 10.6-inch panel fea­tures an opti­cally bonded LCD and cover glass stack, sim­i­lar to what we’ve seen in most mod­ern, high-end smart­phones. Optical bond­ing is expen­sive to do and not as com­mon in large tablet pan­els, but Microsoft believes it can do so at rea­son­able yields on Surface.

The iPad’s cover glass isn’t opti­cally bonded to the LCD, and it shows. The Surface ClearType HD dis­play is a step ahead.

The opti­cally bonded cover glass + LCD stack reduces inter­nal reflec­tions, thus reduc­ing glare and increas­ing light transmission.

The dif­fer­ence between a dis­play with an opti­cally bonded cover glass can be eas­ily seen by com­par­ing the iPhone 4 and the iPad.

One clever trick is that Microsoft, through var­i­ous coat­ings, index matches between the touch sensor’s ITO (Indium Tin Oxide) array and the cover glass, once again in pur­suit of fewer reflections.

This is def­i­nitely clever, but a trick nonethe­less. The bet­ter solu­tion would have been to go with in-cell touch, which is what Apple did with the iPhone 5.

Update 2012.10.29: iFixit tore down the Surface and found the 10.6-inch ClearType HD Display to be sup­plied by Samsung with model num­ber LT106AL01-002.

Update 2012.11.12: Raymond Soneira:

The dis­play on the Microsoft Surface RT out­per­forms all of the stan­dard res­o­lu­tion full size 10 inch Tablets that we have tested in our Display Shoot-Out series. The Lab tests and mea­sure­ments doc­u­mented in the Shoot-Out Comparison Table indi­cate that Microsoft has paid a lot of atten­tion to dis­play per­for­mance for the Surface RT. In par­tic­u­lar, on-screen text is sig­nif­i­cantly sharper, it has a bet­ter fac­tory dis­play cal­i­bra­tion, and also sig­nif­i­cantly lower screen Reflectance than the iPad 2 and all full size 1280×800 Android Tablets. But it is not as sharp as the iPad 3 or 4, nor does it have their large full Color Gamut.

The 10.6-inch 1366×768 ClearType HD Display used in the Microsoft Surface RT is the best there is among 10-inch tablets with non-retina dis­plays. The only prob­lem is the $499 10-inch tablet world has moved on, to retina dis­plays. Even the smaller Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ sports a 1920×1200 pixel for­mat for just $299. The Google Nexus 10 is $100 less and packs in 2560×1600 pix­els. But at $499 Surface RT is really going up against the $499 iPad, which sports a bril­liant 9.7-inch 2048×1536 LCD. The dis­play makes the tablet. Microsoft fell short with the 10.6-inch 1366×768 ClearType HD Display and is ask­ing too much for its Surface RT.