The Case Against OLED

[EJ3]

Is your Sammy broken ?

With only about 20 hours on it, I doubt it. I absolutely have to run the sound through the stereo (confounding my 90 year old mother) to try to hear what Sam Sung.
But the (yes, thicker) Panasonic has good sound (in & of itself) that my mother is quit happy with.
And the picture is better than most (doesn't do 4K but you would think that it was 4K looking at it).

 

[Sal1950]

20 inches. It's a 2004 Mitsubishi 2070SB.

Maybe you can find one of these on fleabay

The pay was good, the tax situation was good & I had room & board, worked a 40 hour week & could do whatever I wanted with my non-work time (of course, when the ship was at sea, that wasn't much but many times it was anchored or pier side somewhere...

Yea right, I heard the stories about your "non-work time" exploits. LOL

 

[EJ3]

Maybe you can find one of these on fleabay

Yea right, I heard the stories about your "non-work time" exploits. LOL

Yep, for 48 years I managed to stay unmarried. Then, suddenly, there was this Chinese gal in Saipan that managed to corral me. I told her that I wanted to wait until I was 50 to get married: She said "You can do that. But I won't be here." That was pretty much the end of my thoughts on the subject.
& the funny thing is that I have not been chomping at the bit for over 19 years now.

 

[Soria Moria]

Maybe you can find one of these on fleabay

Those look like they distort the image quite a lot!

 

[EJ3]

Those look like they distort the image quite a lot!

Some would say: "Pleasant distortion: part of the appeal" perhaps.

 

[Sal1950]

Those look like they distort the image quite a lot!

Yes they would, I was just kidding with you.

Some would say: "Pleasant distortion: part of the appeal" perhaps.

I've heard they were formed from old vacuum tube glass.

 

[Bleib]

BUMP

LG Display OLED Becomes World's First to Achieve "Perfect Color/Brightness" Certification

LG Display, the world's leading innovator of display technologies, announced today that its entire lineup of large-sized OLED panels, including for monitors and TVs, has become the first in the world to receive "Perfect Color/Brightness Accuracy up to 500 lux" certification from global testing...

www.techpowerup.com

"The test results revealed that LG Display's OLED panels—featuring self-emissive pixels—simultaneously recorded 100% color accuracy, 100% brightness accuracy, and color crosstalk-free performance. Therefore, they deliver the creator's intended color and brightness accurately, whatever the viewing environment or type of content. 100% color accuracy means consistent color reproduction regardless of test pattern size; 100% brightness accuracy refers to uniform brightness regardless of test pattern size; color crosstalk-free performance means no color interference between adjacent pixels, enabling precise color expression.

In contrast, LCD displays—which rely on backlight units larger than individual pixels—showed limitations when displaying high dynamic range (HDR) content such as starry night skies or fireworks, where brightness in highlighted areas can be diminished. In some premium LCD TVs using RGB LED backlights, color distortion was observed depending on the background colors."

 

[Krusty09]

Hello.

This may be a little misleading. This .maybe color accuracy in the rec709 space but I dont belive this monitor can fully Create the bt.2020 color space. Supposedly the next bravia911 can but short of that I have not seen it. Even the hx3110 cant fully reproduce it. But its always a good things are moving along.

Cheers

 

[Tim Link]

This is why I sold my LG C2 and replaced it with a CRT for games. Couldn't stomach the bad motion. Pretty good black levels too!

I've got a 20" CRT hooked up to a Nintendo 64 and a Sega Genesis. It's authentic, and the games were definitely designed to be seen that way.
I just recently learned about Nvidia GSync Pulsar to get excellent motion on LCD displays on modern games. OLED can definitely do excellent motion if you give it high enough frame rates. But now it looks like it's hard to beat these new LCD displays at lower frame rates. Although by "lower" their still talking 90 fps and higher.

 

[EJ3]

Is your Sammy broken ?

The 2014 Panasonic Plasma just did, though. It's a shame, now I can't play the Blue Ray of a cracklin' fire on it and warm up (It's 48" just filled the fire place).

 

[Tim Link]

Hello.

This may be a little misleading. This .maybe color accuracy in the rec709 space but I dont belive this monitor can fully Create the bt.2020 color space. Supposedly the next bravia911 can but short of that I have not seen it. Even the hx3110 cant fully reproduce it. But its always a good things are moving along.

Cheers

I've seen the demos of the same scene with and without expanded color space side by side on a display that could show the extra colors. There is a visible difference with highly saturated tones, but if I'm not able to see both images right next to each other it's hard for me to tell which one I'm looking at.

 

[Krusty09]

The problem is hlg which kinda of goes side by side with 2020 is that none of the colors are saturated. Its almost as if you are doing log or raw. Saturated colors have really nothing to do with making 2020. Its really more expanded color but not saturation. Not sure that makes sense.

 

[Tim Link]

...Saturated colors have really nothing to do with making 2020. Its really more expanded color but not saturation. Not sure that makes sense.

Typically we only have 3 primary colors on the display. What expands the color spectrum is how saturated (pure) and precise those 3 colors are produced. If they are not fully saturated they won't be able to combine perceptually to imitate some of the colors we can perceive. So one effect of increased color palette ends up being the ability to produce improved saturation, which for me was the most obvious difference. Come to think of it, it's really the only difference between a bigger vs smaller color space so I'm not sure what else I'd expect to see.

Somebody is again making a display with blue/green subpixels to go along with the other three. As a result they say it can cover the entire rec2020 color space. I doubt most of us would perceive the difference, although it might look wonderful to quadchromats.

 

[Tim Link]

So here's a case I'll make against the practical benefit of OLED. It's not a case against OLED in absolute terms, but in terms of it's excellent capabilities not being applicable in most typical viewing environments. It's also a case against HDR on the same grounds, and pretty much any display technology that provides extreme contrast and saturation beyond what an IPS LCD can do.

The bottom line is that we don't need that much contrast for beautiful media, and presenting extreme contrast is a royal pain.

With HDR if the room isn't really dark you can't see the shadow details. If the room is really dark, a suddenly appearing bright, daylight beach scene can blast your eyeballs out. The solution I hear about is that the paperwhite should be set to 250 or so nits so no overall scene will be all that bright. Only specular highlights will pop way up and they will look spectactular but won't blind you with brightness after your eyes are dark adjusted.
The problem with only allowing specular highlights to get extra bright was documented pretty early in the exploration of HDR content. When you allow a specular highlight to rise well above the average scene brightness, it makes the scene perceptually look dark. This is fine if the scene is supposed to look dark, like night or dim indoor scenes. But when you're supposed to be outside on a sunny and bright day and you try this it just falls flat. You have to let the scene area use more of the brightness capacity that's available because that's what our eye expects once it's seen that the specular highlights can go so bright. So if we're going to do dark room viewing we're just going to have to let the daylight scenes come up nice and bright in proportion to how high we allow our highlights to go. So we're going to have to count on content providers to protect our eyes by gradually raising the scene brightness, or warning us to have our sunglasses ready.

I am all for just letting the bright scenes blast. My eyes can take it. I know they won't be damaged by anything that stays below 10,000 nits. But OLEDs have historically had a problem with full screen brightness on such scenes so they'd cut in with ABL which would sometimes, depending on the TV's settings, also raise the saturation in ABL dimmed areas to try to make up for the lack of brightness. Some people really liked that artificial saturation boost. Icebergs would look darker but rich blue instead of the pale "washed out" bright color they were supposed to be. That's largely a thing of the past now that OLEDs have gotten brighter. But even if they get to the point where they can do 4000 nits full screen continuous the issue with extreme contrast being wasted in anything but very particular viewing environments remains.

An IPS display can do 1000 to 1 contrast natively. It can produce the full p3 color space and support 10 bit color in SDR for very smooth gradients with very nice color saturation. In SDR mode you can just raise the backlight or lower it to whatever you need it to be for comfortable viewing in your environment and it will look fine. If you're sitting in a very dark room you can turn it down and yes, you'll surely see some screen glow. But if the content is mastered to stay within a reasonable contrast range it'll look great and you'll see everything in the shadows as intended with no eye strain, and the gamma will allow your eye to accept brightness levels in dark and light scenes without the odd perceptual issues that arise when trying to support higher contrast. Reduced contrast and non-zero black levels is a feature, not a fault. You can create really great media with it despite it not getting as hyper realistic as HDR with extreme speculars and perfect black potentially can. Your imagination can fill in when it's given a consistent pallet to compare to.
The static contrast ratio of the human eye is only about 100 to 1. This is why photographic prints that only manage 300 to 1 contrast ratio look great to us. An IPS display doing 1000:1 is really quite good. Yes, your iris can adjust as you scan a scene and become aware of higher contrast ratios, but reducing contrast using an appropriate gamma is a great way to make the viewing experience easier.

 

[Jojjelito]

Why would I buy a gray-looking IPS over an OLED with the same native contrast ratio and inky blacks? There are objective measurements for displays too. You don’t save money by going for a nearly as good LCD with RGB backlight. The mainstream displays, sure, but that’s not the point for some of us. I came from a Kuro plasma straight to OLED, so maybe I’ve missed something, but going by my computer monitors, some IPS, some of which are now OLED too, I don’t think so. That said, I agree with the case against extreme contrast and saturation. While it’s nice to know that your display can produce those, ‎I like to turn things down a notch for a less saccharine experience.

Some of the problematic scenes in modern media that’s supposed to showcase HDR are authored weirdly. The famous night scene with the dragon from House of Dragons is authored at 0 nits. You struggle to resolve any shadow detail in that scene unless you crank up the brightness. Regardless of display. Mastering for actual displays, not as some tech demo of HDR would be nice.

 

[Tim Link]

Why would I buy a gray-looking IPS over an OLED with the same native contrast ratio and inky blacks?

Because the IPS may be a lot cheaper, and if you're not watching in a very dark environment it may look good enough to be thoroughly enjoyable.

 

[DY2]

I very rarely watch anything on the 97 Inch Sony Oled, I prefer to watch movies on the projector at all times. It looks great on the Oled, but in an exaggerated way, while on the projector I see details in the same scene where on the Oled I don't see them. For example, in this scene, on the projector the colors are natural, and on the oled they are saturated, no matter which mode I choose, not to mention the lack of details. Of course this applies to me, for others maybe the oled is much better.

 

[Jojjelito]

Wow. That looks like a case of HDR gone overboard with shadow detail crush on the OLED. I don’t watch in total darkness, but most of my viewing is during evening or nights, and my room is light-controlled then. Got my displays dialed in so I rarely get scenes like that. Still, I remember my old Davis DLP projector fondly. Color wheel and all. Glorious DVD days.

It’s going to be interesting to see how NVidia Pulsar screens stack up against OLED for action gaming. Technology marches on. Gaming on a standard IPS is a no go if you ever tried a typical 240Hz OLED.

 

[Bleib]

Well, calibration still matters. The projector should be a bit of a grey mess compared so it might be that it's quite a bit brighter in areas which should be darker.

 

[DY2]

Well, calibration still matters. The projector should be a bit of a grey mess compared so it might be that it's quite a bit brighter in areas which should be darker.

Calibration really matters, that's why I calibrated my 4K protector and put the same movie on both screens. I like the image offered by the projector more than the OLED one, even though OLED is clearly technically superior.