I always had screen protectors on my iPhones and sometimes they saved my day. Currently I use one from ESR which is very high quality and doesn’t affect the image quality of the iPhone 12.
I never had any screen protection on my iPads. My last iPad was a standard 6th gen. iPad with the pencil 1st gen. I heavily used it the last 3 1/2 years. I had it daily with me on movie sets and had no time to baby it. It didn’t took long till the first minor scratches and lots of micro abrasions were visible when holding it in the right light and angle. Then I took it with me to Sri Lanka where I traveled with just a backpack from beach to beach and from jungle to mountains. It had contact with sand and all kind of dust. More scratches happened. Using the iPad watching on it in normal angles, none of the scratches are visible or disruptive in any way. It just doesn’t look like new when screen is off.
Now I got myself a M1 12.9 iPad Pro 512gb with a pencil and magic keyboard. Total cost nearly 2000€. The mini led screen looks just amazing and the feeling using the pencil is way better than it was on my old setup. The display still looks like day one. First I don’t thought about using a protector but keeping the high price in mind and the fact that I just can’t baby it because I need it for my job, I bought the same ESR glass protector for it as I use on my phone. Well, the black isn’t black anymore, reflections are worse now and if you look closely you can see something I would describe as “multicoloured grain”. It’s best visible on white screen, a bit like the protector would break the light of the pixels into a green/red/blue grain all over the display.
I hardly can think about anything else… I must decide and set priorities. With the screen protector I don’t care about scratches, micro abrasion and the annoying dust possibly causing all this. But the display quality looks bad, cheap and just not what I bought this device for… Should I just rip the protector off and enjoy my wonderful iPad like I did in the past without worrying about scratches? Probably the scratches and micro abrasion that are coming with normal usage wouldn’t even be visible under normal conditions. It’s just the little voice that keeps screaming “the next time you touch your unprotected iPad could result in the first minor scratch!” And I just want it to stay so wonderfully flawless.
I mean I know that all those little scratches time would bring, wouldn’t affect my usage and overall quality of the display but I still try to avoid them and ruin the display with a protector instead. Stupid isn it?
I guess I will keep the screen protection until I made peace with the fact, that the future scratches won’t affect my experience and the non protected screen image quality makes me happier than a protected screen looking cheap.
I am ashamed that such a first world problem bothers me so much….