Do OLED displays solve our problems with color calibration?

Good Morning,
while looking for a good deal for a “better” monitor (some ASUS ProArt display with a built in colorimeter) I was stumbling over a re-occurring theme that “OLED displays are inherently more color accurate”. I found this to be interesting and discovered this article which says that while OLEDs are more vibrant and contrasty the workhorse solution for long term stable results are still calibrated IPS displays:

What is your knowledge and experience? Is an un-calibrated / factory calibrated OLED display suitable for photo editing? Do we still have to rely on being able to calibrate our displays ourselves or are modern displays already good “out of the box”?

Good Morning,

A few months ago, I thought the same thing, and bought an Asus PG27UCDM (4K240 27" OLED). It was a disaster.

The problem is, these OLED screens are meant for media playback in a darkened room. Their pitch black and peak brightness shines in a dark room. However, their average brightness is very low. OLEDs can be bright in tiny areas, but can’t extend that brightness to the whole screen. By default, the screen dynamically adjusted brightness, so if you moved a white window onto the screen, the rest of the screen dimmed. That may be fine for movies and games, but was obviously terrible for desktop work. You can disable this, but that limits brightness to 200-or-so nits, which is not bright at all. No problem in a dark room, but not bright enough for an ergonomically lit office.

Furthermore, the screen (like many OLEDs) has a non-standard color matrix, which gives text a fuzzy, multicolored shimmering outline. You can disable such subpixel font rendering on an OS level, but there are always some apps who do it anyways.

Finally, the screen comes with various burn-in prevention methods, which dim and periodically shift static screen elements. I found it hugely distracting to have my task bar and menu bar shift around periodically, even if only by a few pixels.

And that beautiful black point? In my bright office, it was masked by ambient glare anyways. The colors were nice and accurate, though.

I sent it back. For all my hopes of buying an “apex screen”, this one was uniquely mismatched with my requirements. I replaced it with an Asus ProArt PA27UCGE (4K160 27" IPS), with hardware calibration. Since this is built for graphics work in a lit environment, it comes with tremendously good anti glare coatings that actually resulted in a much darker black point than the OLED. And the hardware calibration is surprisingly useful, too, since it applies to all apps, not just color-managed ones. I have since bought a second one, because it just works well.

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Extremely helpful. I was looking at this:

https://www.mydealz.de/deals/amazon-asus-proart-pa32uce-monitor-32-2709101

I still find 850 € for a screen to be extremely much …

I think that’s the 32" version of my screen. It’s a tremendous display!

I found it a bit confusing to set up; For Display-P3, you need to separately select the color space (DCI-P3), the white point (6500K), and a gamma (2.2) in the OSD, and set your operating system to Display-P3.

When calibrating, make sure to calibrate in a dark room. The calibrator is not sealed against stray light, and will mis-measure otherwise.

The desktop software is not great. But the beauty of the hardware calibration is that you don’t need to use it. Just calibrate from the OSD instead.

It seems that this 32" version only runs at 60 Hz, though. 160 Hz is awfully nice, I have to say. That’s a feature I didn’t know I’d love. Scrolling random websites and apps just looks so much more natural! (If your GPU and driver can handle it. Not all can). Because of that alone, I’d go with the PA27UCGE instead. I’d now take 160 Hz over a bigger display.

Are you sure you didn’t have any dynamic setting enabled? I have an LG C4 42" and with all the dynamic settings disabled this does not happen at all, brightness is constant throughout the screen, and can also get quite bright overall

Yes, as I mentioned, it can be disabled. But that limits brightness severely.

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On the calibration front I just came across this little baby…

https://www.asus.com/ca-en/displays-desktops/monitors/display-accessories-arm-light-bar-others/proart-calicontro-mca02/

See also this interesting video from team 2 film:

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That was a surprisingly good video! Thank you for sharing. Note that they are talking about video reference monitors, which are meant to be used in a darkened room.

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