OLED vs LCD

[AMD_Fan]

I wish there was a perfect display technology, but each has its pros and cons.

OLED has a LOT of pros, but two very serious cons - limited lifetime and screen burn-in. They might be able to bring the lifetime to over 60,000 hours which will be more than acceptable, but the burn-in, just like with plasmas, is impossible to completely overcome at least from what I've read (I might be wrong). Especially for PC monitor use with menus, etc.

LCDs on the other hand are getting better. E-IPS is bringing cheap IPS panels with great viewing angles and beautiful true colors at affordable prices, LED backlighting is making it possible for displays to be extremely thin, although that's not really an issue for desktop monitors, but the largest setbacks of LCDs are blacks + backlight bleeding. It's impossible to have true blacks and even the best monitors suffer from minor bleeding around the edges.

So I honestly don't know which technology is better in the long run. I'd like to know that I can leave my monitor on for 24 hours displaying the same thing and it won't burn in, but at the same time I love the true blacks, contrast and 0% viewing angle distortion of OLEDs (even IPS panels have a bit of distortion).

Everyone is excited about OLED displays right now, but honestly I don't see why. For portable devices sure - less power consumption and less space, but for PC monitors the burn-in and limited lifetime for me will definitely be a huge issue.

And it seems those issues will never be truly solved, because they're deeply rooted in the way the respective technologies work. LCDs will never be able to display true blacks and OLEDs will never be able to completely eliminate burn-in and last as long as LCDs, especially LED backlit LCDs which can last for decades.

So, which one do you prefer? Will you switch to an OLED monitor when they become available in 3-4 years if the lifetime and burn-in issues are still as severe?

 

[daveswantek]

I think that the vendors do not give a rip about quality, they only care about volume, because that produces profit and market share. It is a race to the bottom, quality is going down with price and most people are buying it. How many threads do you see on here that say something like "Best 24 for under $300". Eyefinity makes it worse, because now they can sell cheap junk times 3 to each customer. The same vendors will be selling OLED and they will screw it up just as bad in yet another race to the bottom.

Sorry buy I like you am sick and tired of all the cheap junk that has come out over the past 2 or 3 years. The numerious QA issues with 30 inch panals (even NEC) is a perfect example of what I am talking about. It used to be that when you dropped some serious dough on a Sony GDM series CRT, you could forget about displays for several years, because you had something close to perfect and it would last that long.

Quality is a thing of the past

Dave

 

[JaguarSKX]

Quality has it's price...

I invested a lot into my two monitors in my sig. I currently using my cheapo TN panel Asus VK246H that's connected to my HTPC 'cause I'm doing a refresh install and doing some tests.

 

[Inu]

Can only really make so many claims about a technology that is at least 4 years away from mainstream.

 

[[X]eltic]

The sad thing is that we already have the technology to make MUCH better screens, but producing these screens has been difficult primarily due to patent issues. It's called surface-conduction electron-emitter display technology or SED. These screens combine the best aspects of LCDs and CRTs together:

-CRT response time and no input lag
-CRT viewing angles
-CRT color/contrast
-LCD (screen)size
-LCD power efficiency
-LCD sharpness
-No backlight bleeding (there is no backlight).
-Perfect uniformity (everything is exactly the same on screen).

And I'm not completely sure about this, but I believe SED screens have no native resolution. I believe you can switch between resolutions just like you can with CRTs. Of course, this is possible with LCD screens too, but the non-native resolutions are interpolated and therefore blurry. Apparently, that's not the case with SED screens.

Personally, even if I had to pay 2-3 times the cost for such a screen in comparison to even the best LCDs currently on the market, I would do so.

 

[Hels]

OLED have all those advantages, and even beat it in some :/ Plasma burn-in is hardly an issue anymore, i say bring on the OLED

 

[Lunknumb]

The sad thing is that we already have the technology to make MUCH better screens, but producing these screens have been difficult primarily due to patent issues. It's called surface-conduction electron-emitter display or SED. These screens combine the best aspects of LCDs and CRTs together:

-CRT response time and no input lag
-CRT viewing angles
-CRT color/contrast
-LCD size
-LCD power efficiency
-LCD sharpness
-No backlight bleeding (there is no backlight).
-Perfect uniformity (everything is exactly the same on screen).
-Don't have to worry about dead pixels (there are no pixels to worry about).

And I'm not completely sure about this, but I believe SED screens have no native resolution. I believe you can switch between resolutions just like you can with CRTs.

Personally, even if I had to pay 2-3 times the cost for such a screen in comparison to even the best LCDs currently on the market, I would do so.

Highlighted the suspicious bits.

No input lag?

Last I checked, AMOLEDs (which is what high res displays is) are still TFTs. They'll need exactly the same scalers and processing you do on a LCD TFT. Even more so in the LUT department since it'll have to compensate for different colors having different characteristics and deteriorating at different rates. What you don't get is the buffering you get with early *VA style RTC, but IPS and TNs are already doing overdrive without buffering, so that's a moot point ass well.

The lowest input lag LCDs have low input lag because they don't offer fancy scalers or LUT mechanics. It'll be exactly the same with OLED.

No dead pixels is a long shot as well. There are cerainly pixels. Each pixel is three LEDs packed together instead of 3 LCD gates, which is why the layout is that of a TFT, exactly like current LCDs are. Sony throws away a massive amount of the panels they make for the 11" due to quality issues, way more than any LCD manufacturer. We'll see a host of production quality issues with AMOLED panels as well, if not dead pixels (probably will see that though), then at least a couple of new ones will turn up.

Not saying they won't be great, but there seems to be a misconception that OLED will be the silver bullet to fix every issue we have with LCD. But it's not. It takes care of a couple of big ones, like black levels and response times, but not everything.

 

[[X]eltic]

I edited my post. And I was talking about SED btw, which is a completely different technology.

 

[[X]eltic]

OLED have all those advantages, and even beat it in some :/ Plasma burn-in is hardly an issue anymore, i say bring on the OLED

This is not true. As pointed out by Lunknumb, OLEDs will have input lag, SEDs won't have that. Another advantage of SED screens is that they will probably have no native resolution, since it's basically the same technology as CRTs, only in a smaller package and improved.

 

[Benny]

Dead emitters on an SED/FED don't necessarily translate into a dead pixel, since a pixel is made of many tiny emitters.
It sux FED-tech wasn't able to finance the plant for production....
but there still seems to be some hope now that AUO entered the picture.
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=PR&date=20100120&id=11029504

Another advantage of SED screens is that they will probably have no native resolution, since it's basically the same technology as CRTs, only in a smaller package and improved.

nope, the emitters are smaller than the pixel, but the individual RGB pixels are still arranged in the same way as in an LCD.
http://www.fe-tech.co.jp/en/structure/structure.html
(main FED/SED difference is the shape of the emmiters)

 

[[X]eltic]

Hmm, knowing that, I think I have to somewhat agree with Hels then. If OLED is much easier to produce on a mass scale, compared to SED, it seems that OLED is the better technology. Input lag is an issue, but that will vary with each screen probably anyway, just as it varies with current LCD screens (some have no input lag at all).

Benny, do you know of any other advantages of SED/FED compared to OLED? I was always quite enthousiastic about these screens, but it seems that OLED has pretty much all the advantages too.

 

[Benny]

Hmm, knowing that, I think I have to somewhat agree with Hels then. If OLED is much easier to produce on a mass scale, compared to SED, it seems that OLED is the better technology. Input lag is an issue, but that will vary with each screen probably anyway, just as it varies with current LCD screens (some have no input lag at all).

Benny, do you know of any other advantages of SED/FED compared to OLED? I was always quite enthousiastic about these screens, but it seems that OLED has pretty much all the advantages too.

It depends on implementation and usage.

The main advantage of SED for the consumer is a longer
lifetime.
The phosphors are comparable to those of a CRT and won't age like current OLEDs.
So you can expect an SED/FED to survive a decade of pc use
while retaining the emissive capabilities like an old fashioned CRT but also keeping perfect focus since it's a fixed pixel display like an LCD.
(..so you can use it until a RoHS whisker causes a short... http://images.google.de/images?hl=d...kers&btnG=Suche&aq=&oq=whisker+solder&start=0 but that's the same for all monitors)

Current OLEDs decrease in brightness when used, and if not matched, colors will age at different speeds with blue having the lowest life expectancy.
So if you'd display a black background with icons for prolonged periods of time, a full white picture will show inverted yellow icon shadows (until you display an inverted picture of the icons for the same time you displayed them normally).
The independently aging colors will also tint the image yellow as blue gets weaker.
(CRT/SED phosphors also age but the effect isn't as strong as with plasmas and OLED. LCD aging mainly affects the backlight so it'll loose brightness, subjective picture quality staying almost identical)

colors
The shown FEDs prototypes use CRTish phosphors so they'll have the same gamut and feel as an old sRGB CRT monitor.
OLEDs tend to have a higher gamut which might be great or terrible depending on your taste usage and the implementation of sRGB mode.

Motion and Ergonomics
FEDs "flash" the picture onto the screen like CRTs which can be an advantage for motion perception, and there have been reports of the xel OLED flickering, likely for causing the same effect, but here probably by deliberately adding a short black frame.
Flickering causes ergonomic problems, OLEDs don't have to, FEDs will probably.
But when running at the perceptual limit of 240Hz/fps (real ones) like the FED prototype... flicker isn't much of an issue... (due to the short OLED response times they'll probably also be able to provide real 240fps, if enough consumers demand it...)
So the only ergonomic/health issue of FED/SEDs will be a little bit of CRT radiation.


So in short, FED is an LCD formfactor CRT, with perfect LCD sharpness (fixed resolution), CRT performance, radiation and durability.

OLED provides more, more gamut, and more possibilities (stuff like curved or transparent displays)... but also more profits because you'll have to buy a new one once the emitters died down enough to ruin the picture... (even if they got to plasma level for emitter durability in some tests, using a plasma for static image pc use isn't really recommended either...)

And there's one more important point: SED/FED technology is already capable of producing PC displays superior to everything that's on the market, but it was held up by legal (canon lawsuit) and financial issues. (FE-tech, pioneer monitor plant investment... just in time for the US implosion)
OLED is in its current state, like traditionally plasma, only suitable for moving pictures like games and movies.


hope it helps

 

[[X]eltic]

Thanks for the info, that's really helpful and clears some things up

 

[Snowdog]

This is not true. As pointed out by Lunknumb, OLEDs will have input lag, SEDs won't have that. Another advantage of SED screens is that they will probably have no native resolution, since it's basically the same technology as CRTs, only in a smaller package and improved.

This is incorrect.

There is no technical reason for OLEDs to have Lag. A lot of LCDs that always have lag(PVA) seem to be tied to trying to do extensive overdrive on these slow responding screens.

OLEDs have ridiculously fast response time, in microseconds, faster than any LCD/CRT/Plasma, faster than anything we have seen before. Absolutely no need for overdrive type processing.

Also incorrect that SED has no native resolution. CRT is like a giant phosphor set that you scan a beam on, you change the beam scan to change resolution. SED OTOH, is like a bunch of one pixel CRTs. Each pixel is separate and uniquely addressible. It has a native resolution.

SED is pretty much dead. It missed it's window of opportunity.

OLED is heir apparent. Expected to be cost competetive in 2016. So don't hold your breath.

 

[Lunknumb]

This is incorrect.

There is no technical reason for OLEDs to have Lag.

Unless they conjure up a way to do instant scaling and LUT corrections, then yes there is.

 

[Snowdog]

Unless they conjure up a way to do instant scaling and LUT corrections, then yes there is.

Scaling is trivial. These can all be done today on the video card virtually instant.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see the first lag tests against CRT showing OLED as faster!

 

[Lunknumb]

Viritually instant, yes, as couple of ms spent here and there depending on the mode. Just in the same sense it's viritually instant in LCD-TFT adding up to a mere 5-10ms on the good ones.

Just check out what the "game mode" involves on the DELL 2410 and the NEC 24WMGX3. It's simply a bypass parts of the scaler (some options become unavailable), and individual color adjustments that cuts the NEC from 20ish down to 8ms. Same story for the Dell, cut the LUT correction bit and a few other features cuts it into about half. RTC is not affected in any of them.

AMOLED-TFT does not have an advantage over LCD-TFT in this regard, and will have the same kind of lag LCDs have. Overdrive is not the sole source of input lag, and not even the biggest one on no-previous-generation PVA.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see the first lag tests against CRT showing OLED as faster!

This statement just shows you don't know how a analogue video signal and a CRT-display operates.

 

[lawless2142]

Just to be clear here, input lag is really a mis-nomer. Really all we're doing is comparing delay to a CRT reference, not "input" lag. It's very difficult to measure actual total input lag in a system. I think Anand or Tom's had an article on this a while back.

A small amount of delay from a scaler would likely not be a big problem so long as it can be masked by the total delay of the system (such as a 1 frame delay from video buffering of 60ms) and all processing occurs well within that delay. I think most DSP's incur some sort of lag.

 

[daveswantek]

Just to be clear here, input lag is really a mis-nomer. Really all we're doing is comparing delay to a CRT reference, not "input" lag. It's very difficult to measure actual total input lag in a system. I think Anand or Tom's had an article on this a while back.

A small amount of delay from a scaler would likely not be a big problem so long as it can be masked by the total delay of the system (such as a 1 frame delay from video buffering of 60ms) and all processing occurs well within that delay. I think most DSP's incur some sort of lag.

Correct; you really need to look at the total system response time starting with the mouse.

Here is the artical you mentioned:http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3601&p=7

Dave

 

[Benny]

actual total input lag in a system.

when you want to be overprecise about terminology.. that would refer to the time needed for the input until it's recognized by the software.
Although the term was coined through searching for what caused an occurrence that felt like real mouse-"input-lag" we usually know that "input-lag", when it's mentioned in a monitor forum... tends to refer to monitor-latency and not whole-system-latency.

It would have made more sense to use a new term like "output-lag" or "monitor-lag" but the name "input-lag" kinda stuck.. (since that's how language works)
But whatever the name, in order to decrease system-lag, monitor-lag needs to be kept low.
And I doubt the rest of a normal system manages to lag 150ms and up like some LCD TVs.. or even as much as a good old samsung 245T..

It's also really complicated measuring output-lag properly since most graphic card outputs aren't in sync.
http://www.prad.de/en/monitore/specials/inputlag/inputlag.html for the most comprehensive read on the subject. (btw. back when input lag was new, Prad used the therm monitor-latency)


on future technology monitor latency,
the pixel matrix of OLEDs and SED/FEDs itself won't cause any noticeable delay. (the only thing that lags in this department of LCDs is the pixel response time)
And both technologies are fast enough to not need any overdrive or equivalent (laggy) technology.

The only potential added lag risk with OLED compared to SED/FED is that, due to the aging properties, there might be compensating electronics added, which could cause some additional image processing (not buffering)..
but this all is pure speculation.

 

[Happy Hopping]

OLED have all those advantages, and even beat it in some :/ Plasma burn-in is hardly an issue anymore, i say bring on the OLED

since when?

 

[Happy Hopping]

The sad thing is that we already have the technology to make MUCH better screens, but producing these screens has been difficult primarily due to patent issues. It's called surface-conduction electron-emitter display technology or SED. These screens combine the best aspects of LCDs and CRTs together:
.

but I thought SED is no longer pursue by most major manufacturer for ?? reason. As to OLED, we move from plasma to LED for good reason, moving back to a technology that has burn in issue would be going backward in time

 

[Walker]

since when?

As long as you use the TV for what it is made for, burn in on modern plasmas is very unlikely.

but I thought SED is no longer pursue by most major manufacturer for ?? reason. As to OLED, we move from plasma to LED for good reason, moving back to a technology that has burn in issue would be going backward in time

What do you mean? LED LCD is not exactly the replacement for plasma, is it?

 

[LastQuestion]

As long as you use the TV for what it is made for, burn in on modern plasmas is very unlikely.


What do you mean? LED LCD is not exactly the replacement for plasma, is it?

Burn-in is unlikely, but annoying image-retention is a fact of life. Given it's doubtful anyone can truly notice IR during normal viewing or gaming it can get bad enough to where it is if you play, say, Gears of War a lot, like I do. But, that's just a trade-off. Currently you can't get a better PQ and frame buffer than with a pany plasma. The same will be true about OLED. The theme here and the plain truth is no display technology is perfect and choosing one will always involve some personal trade-off one is willing to make.

 

[AndreRio]

When Lcd's started they were full of problems too. Will Oled's get better in time or This is it for Oled tech.?

 

[SH1]

OLED vs LCD

Porsche vs. Model T

Filet Mignon vs. SPAM

(Kidding, but yeah, putting a lot of hopes on OLED for sure...)

 

[Outbreaker]

LCD was invented to fuck people over and take their money espeachely the first generation of LCD's what a joke this was against the CRT's.
OLED is the real CRT alternative.

 

[evilsofa]

OLED has a LOT of pros, but two very serious cons

OLED has only one con that matters - you can't buy one. Unless you're able to drop 5 figures on a display, that is. OLED displays won't be going mainstream until 2015, at least.

Nice necropost, LastQuestion.

 

[Outbreaker]

No OLED going mainstream 2013 if the world doesn't end.
The LG 55-inch OLED TV production starting this july and is expected to cost around $8,000 USD initially, and then drop down to around $4,000 USD in 2013.
So we could see a 27" Monitors in 2013 that cost around 1000$ or less.