I’ve been hearing a myriad of early purchasers talk about their iPad 2 screens exhibiting signs of heavy light leakage around the edges of their screens so I decided to investigate. I found that my iPad 2 did indeed have several areas that show signs of light leakage around the borders of the screen. But I did a bit more digging and guess what? So does my original iPad.

After hearing from folks and seeing this piece on Engadget I decided to poke around to see if I could duplicate the light leak issue. I shot some images of the light leaks on my iPad 2 and original iPad in lit conditions and in darkness. You can clearly see that there are several areas around the borders of the screen that are showing up as lighter than the areas around them. This is a result of the backlight of the LCD screen not being sealed off completely in those spots. This results in light leaking around the top of the LCD panel and underneath the digitizer and glass. This light bloom can be made larger by pressing you finger agains the edge of the screen but are clearly visible whether you do so or not.

The easiest way to see the light leakage is with a pure black image, I’ve provided one here for you. Once you’ve saved the image to your iPad, go ahead and open the photo library and choose it. Tap once to remove the controls and you should be able to see the leaks clearly.

Since this leakage is a production issue, it’s unlikely that we’ll see any fix for current iPads, perhaps the process will be refined in the future, it’s hard to say at this point. Since the issue has existed on the original iPad all this time however, I wouldn’t hold your breath for this to go away any time soon. The good news is that it’s incredibly difficult to see any of these areas if the screen isn’t 100% black, which should prevent most people from ever being bothered by it. I have to say though that in dark games like Dead Space or movies that are relatively dark like The Dark Knight for instance, I was able to see them and now that I’ve done this examination, I’m able to see them more clearly than I ever was on my original iPad.

Here’s hoping that this is an issue that can be fixed by using the same bonding process on the next iPad that the iPhone 4 is using to mate the screen and glass more closely.