One Display to Rule Them May Be Internal OLED

by Rian

I thought we were past the era of VHS v.s. Betamax, or Blu-ray v.s. HD-DVD. Turns out, we are having a war of attrition due to neither party has technological nor market supremacy than the other. I’m talking about LCD and OLED, of course. If you were thinking for a moment, ‘hang on, shouldn’t it be the time OLED takes the throne?’, I will explain what led me to write this piece.

OLED is the one display that triumphs all other, objectively. Having said that, I haven’t found that many reasons to avoid using OLED for internal display of an electronics device. Smartphones and laptops are upgraded roughly every 3 years on average, which coincide with the lifespan of most OLED displays. Irregardless of OLED burn-ins, if the device in question is outdated, there is little value left in maintaining that said device.

What about OLED displays for entertainment, televisions in living room or home cinema? Unless you have it set on the same channel all day long, I doubt you will suffer burn-ins before the new breakthroughs in home theaters happen again only to go shopping for a new TV. On my TV alone, I watch regular cable channels, movies, dramas, and some video games. You could say I am using the ‘whole’ display.

The problem really lies with the computer external monitors, or regular monitors attached to the desktops. I’ve read reviews covering on the merits of using OLED in home office environment, and every single one of them, while praising the picture quality that is exclusive to OLED displays, hinted several issues with the OLED. OLED display is dimmer than LCD, and it is recommended to be used at low brightness to safeguard against burn-ins and to take advantage of contrast ratio. Manufacturers have taken liberty to add automatic OLED care features kick in, auto adjusting brightness, shifting pixels, to name the few, but the spec sheets are not entirely clear on what each monitor will do given what circumstances. It is definitely not the most ideal workspace to be had.

What’s even more bizarre is the fact that OLED manufacturers are expected to push more firmware updates that can “fix” the monitors. I’m not sure if it’s in any shape or form practical to rely on hardware manufacturers to update their softwares; I believe platforms, such as smartphones, would have more incentives to act on it.

Monitor market, as of now, seems rather divided. I couldn’t find ‘one size fits all’ type of display, let alone a product with decent quality control. Some of the renowned manufacturers were going through QC issues, and I haven’t been able to find what the respective manufacturers have done to mitigate the issues — only that the reviewers had to keep asking for replacement. Perhaps the era of external monitors is coming to an end very slowly.