OLED display opinions?

Hardware
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I think this relates to us here because it’s a recently popular display technology that is wiggling its way into laptops and PC displays.

I’ve had the opportunity to see, use and test a few OLED displays targeted at laptops now (perk of the job, see newer machines come across my desk sometimes) and I have to say I see more downsides than upsides over IPS for typical desktop and creative applications. They are nice and wide gamut out of the box but as I the uneven aging of the subpixels means this will drift overtime as the blue elements die off. This is accelerated by running an OLED panel at high brightness levels. I remember similar drifting issues back in the CRT and CCFL LCD days so that definitely is a step backwards from IPS LCD LED backlight screens. This also means your display has a “best by” date, seemingly about 2-4 years maybe depending on use. This uneven aging is also what causes the burn in effect. Allegedly HDR content will also further stress an OLED panel.

Personally I found OLEDs to be overly saturated looking and I wasn’t fond of the text rendering. Seems like using this kind of display for color sensitive print work may be less than ideal. In theory you can compensate for that but so far I can’t say I care for the raw OLED look. Not to mention the PWM pulses bothered me at lower brightness levels on the machines I’ve seen.

Theoretically they have lower power consumption since black is represented by a powered off LED elements but I’ve rarely seen that bear out in tests. As someone who’s not the biggest fan of dark mode GUIs this seems like a bad trade off anyway.

OLED really seems like a flawed technology. I can maybe see why they are popular for TV screens, the deep blacks, etc. But for productivity and creative applications on a PC I’d rather have IPS LCD until microLED or whatever comes along. The RTINGS test I linked above, while done with TVs, seems to show that if you’re using one of these things as a PC monitor with static UI elements it will burn in between 2500-5000 hours of use. Again, not a big deal for TVs as static content isn’t as common and you’re probably not watching it that many hours a day (or really shouldn’t be, remember to kill your TV) but on a workstation or laptop display where you may be working 5-8 hours a day with all kinds of static UI elements on the screen this seems like a problem to me.

Linux specific issues I’ve noticed: backlight adjustment is hit or miss depending on the screen and laptop model. There’s some color profile hacks you can do to simulate it sometimes and some models do seem to support OLED backlight adjustment on recent kernels. Otherwise you’re just running your screen full tilt. This is because OLEDs aren’t really backlit as are traditional LCDs and the support isn’t all the way there yet in Linux.

My tin foil hat conspiracy side says OEMs are all over OLED right now because it’s another forced deprecation move. Imagine if your screen has bad burn in or color drift after a few years and is probably the first or second most expensive part to replace on your laptop out of warranty. Just chuck it in the bin and buy a new one!

I’ve got IPS LCD panels that are 5-6 years old and still chugging a long fine so maybe I’m not the typical customer. My guess is if you’re the type to upgrade ever 2-ish years none of this will be an issue.

At any rate, anyone else have experience with these things? What are your thoughts?

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According to linked article, the increased saturation in oled is due to more consistent gamut at lowering EV’s. While certain screens advertise as having x% of y gamut, this is only true at a particular EV, and as the scene intensity decreases, so does the technologies ability to deliver wide gamut.
https://clarkvision.com/articles/a-revolution-is-coming-to-photography/

If so, the increased saturation of oled is actually a truer representation, but it might not look right, as we have edited our images to look good on displays that behave differently.

I’m by no means an expert, I just link to what I’ve read. The main reason I have held off on purchasing oled is as you explain - the deterioration in accuracy over a relatively short period of time. I don’t have the money to be replacing a monitor every 2 years.

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This is why the scene referred space matters.

I’m getting the same read out of that Carkvision article that you are. That might be where the folk-logic of don’t edit above 70% of your screen’s max brightness" comes from too on traditional LCDs. I hadn’t heard that OLEDs are more accurate across a wider EV range but it kind of makes sense at a physical level as you’re not passing an LED through a medium but the medium itself is the light source.

It’s nice if that’s the case. I still don’t care for the text rendering of the OLEDs I’ve seen so far. Black on white seems rough but it could just be Windows 10 not doing whatever font smoothing correctly. GNOME looked a little better when booted form a F34 live USB. I am not a Windows expert.

The PWM pulsing at lower brightness settings is still a problem as is the durability. I’m kind of trying to watch my eWaste production and OLEDs don’t seem like a step in the right direction in that regard. That being said microLED looks promising if it holds up. Basically OLED without the durability problems. But for those reasons alone I’m going to regard OLED as an intermediate tech and try to skip it I think.

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It depends on the quality and make of the OLED. Even though I have never used such a device before, based on what I have read, whichever technology you use, there is always a low, medium and high tier product. There is a difference in quality control. If you are lucky, your display performs as expect; unlucky, you get bad or slow pixels or light leaks or flickers and it dies within a week, or when placed next to your other display you realize that everything is off and regret that you ever trusted it for colour critical work. Maybe the colour and brightness shift happens as it warms up or if you have it on for too long at a sitting. Anyway, I am ranting a bit. The message is that things aren’t that simple.

If it were me, I would wait for microLED, unless your display died and you need to replace it immediately. If that is the case, I would probably replace it with what I already have because it has been tried and tested, with known characteristics. Maybe upgrade to a higher/newer model if the $ is flowing.

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This is my thoughts too. The OLED laptops I’ve seen are allegedly the high end ones and I would guess that the color drift/aging issues would be quicker on lower end models.

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