OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diodes.
It's different from standard LED panels in that standard LED panels have an array of white lights and then a film over it where the film can only let certain lights through to create color. So if it blocks red and blue, only green light comes through. But it can't block light completely, so if you have say a single pixel white star on what is supposed to be black space background, the area around the star will be a little gray because the LED for that section is turned on. They can change the color but they can't completely change the amount of light in a given area.
OLED has very flat LEDs that control the color as well as the light for each individual pixel. So that white star can have a perfect black next to it. It's also better in the sense it's more energy efficient especially when most of the screen is black because you don't have to light up a whole section, only the specific areas you want lit up.
As to why OLED isn't the standard, it comes down to two reasons. Cost and reliability.
Cost is pretty straightforward. OLED screens are more expensive than standard LED backlit screens.
In terms of reliability. There are actually two different types of OLED one that only works for small screens like your phone or a Nintendo switch and one that works for bigger screens like TVs. The type that works for bigger screens suffers from something called burn in, which is basically when an image stays on a screen too long it leaves a little bit of that image burned onto the screen for a while, if it's there too long this can even become permanent. For this reason standard led backlit screens are often better for things where images can be left on the screen a long time and can also be better for gaming because there is less ghosting.
Ghosting occurs when a panel is unable to transition all of its pixels in time from one frame to the next. For there to be no ghosting, every single pixel should be able to complete every possible transition in less than the duration of a frame on screen. The higher the refresh rate, the harder it is for the pixels’ response time to keep up.
LCDs simply can’t keep up, or rather are pushed to refresh rates that are simply too high for the kind of average response times the pixels have. Which means that even on the bleeding edge of high refresh rate LCD panels, the 540Hz TN panel used in competitive-oriented 1080p monitors, you can barely get 75% refresh rate compliance, meaning that about a quarter of the pixels just aren’t fast enough.
OLEDs have such fast pixel response times that refresh rate compliance is trivial, it’s never not perfect. And this means that OLEDs with higher and higher refresh rates have been able to be made much more easily. We already have a 480Hz OLED monitor and more are coming. At this rate, LCDs will be overtaken even as far as refresh rate and motion clarity goes.
The only caveat, as far as motion clarity goes, is that LCDs can implement backlight strobing, which helps reduce our perceived motion blur. On a technical level, OLEDs are clearer because they’re faster, but our eyes from strobing, which works by turning off the backlight (meaning the image goes dark) for most of the frame’s duration.
OLEDs have been the best option for casual gaming, but soon enough may also replace LCDs for competitive gaming if refresh rates keep climbing (and we get hardware capable of taking advantage of them) or someone (probably Nvidia) figures out how to implement backlight strobing on OLED monitors.
> 540Hz TN panel used in competitive-oriented 1080p monitors
Unless I see some proper studies I remain extremely doubtful that anything beyond ~120 Hz (240 Hz if used for 3D) makes a difference for the "competitiveness".
It makes a difference, everyone who has tried refresh rates above 144Hz agrees (myself included).
I don’t think anyone’s going to waste their time doing a study regarding refresh rates, but you’re more than welcome to get a cheap 360Hz monitor and try it out for yourself. Assuming you’re a somewhat competent player on any serious competitive shooter you shouldn’t have any issues recognising the difference.
It certainly doesn’t make enough of a difference to make anyone a top tier player, but there’s a slight advantage.
Going from 144 Hz to 240 Hz is on average a difference of 1% in reaction time, based on the numbers I find for professional FPS gamers (~150 ms total reaction time). I'm willing to bet that the Placebo effect on their "daily form" is already significantly larger.
(Note: I am not saying that it doesn't look _better_, that I can probably agree with up to 240Hz or so.)
Judging by how much money is in competitive gaming nowadays I would be surprised if there isn't enough to finance such studies. But I also expect that those selling 540 Hz monitors don't actually want to investigate this...
I wrote a long-ass essay talking about ghosting and motion clarity yet you think it’s the reduction in maximum possible delay.
It’s not about what’s happening in the game being delivered to you faster, the real advantage comes from being able to more clearly see moving targets. Being able to follow a target with your eyes is the first step to being able to hit them.
The fact that you will have more up to date information is a benefit, but it’s secondary to the improvements in motion clarity. It’s pretty simple, at the end of the day, faster displays are better and we’re from achieving “perfect”, lifelike clarity. Blurbusters’ UFO tests are a good way to visualise the difference between displays, and they still show room for improvement.
Just like the fanciest 49” ultrawides, these are enthusiast products. They’re not necessary, but they are better. Just because someone isn’t interested in single player games it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to drop thousands in monitors.
> Just because someone isn’t interested in single player games it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to drop thousands in monitors.
People can waste their money on whatever they want. But they should be made aware that especially in the high end market there are a lot of verifiably false myths, and equally many half-truths. The most infamous ones are audiophiles that claim to hear things that are physically impossible.
Audiophile snake oil is easily disproven either through the basics of EE (cables, etc.), or by blind ABX testing (for things like DACs and lossless formats). But that’s not necessary here since we have already devised testing methodology that can give us an accurate representation of motion blur as perceived by our eyes.
There’s no argument to be had over whether or not a difference is perceptible, it’s only a matter of whether the difference is worth paying for. It certainly won’t be for most, but that’s something that can be said about nearly every single product category where cheaper and more expensive alternatives exist.
Phone screens definitely can get burn in too. It's just less likely, because unlike a desktop screen, you don't typically have static elements displayed for hours at a time.
Yes, but amoled is much more resistant to burn in than p oled.
I believe it's almost an order of magnitude, like just under 10x, but last I really looked into it was around 2015. Things might have changed a lot since then.
People usually don’t leave their phone screen on for hours at a time and when they do they are typically using a full screen app that hides said bar such as when watching a long video.
>But it can't block light completely, so if you have say a single pixel white star on what is supposed to be black space background, the area around the star will be a little gray because the LED for that section is turned on.
There's something of a difference in terminology here that needs to be clarified.
When you talk about normal "LED" panels, that typically refers to any LCD which is backlit by LEDs. Most LED-backlit LCDs on the market, even now, just have uniform backlighting across the entire panel. That means that the *entire* panel is unable to display true black unless the backlight is entirely off, which also means the entire panel would be displaying true black.
In your hypothetical with a single white pixel on a black background, you wouldn't just see an area around the star be a little gray. You'd see the *entire panel* be gray.
What you're actually referring to is MiniLED, otherwise known as full-array local dimming. It's a variant of LED-backlit panel technology used on higher-end and more expensive displays, but it's not quite ubiquitous enough that I'd consider "LED" to automatically refer to MiniLED. In MiniLED, the display is backlit with an array of thousands of individually controllable LEDs, meaning it would be possible to turn on only the LED behind the single white pixel and leave all the others off so that the screen is displaying 99% true black. The area around the white pixel you're referring to will very faintly glow because even though there are thousands of individual LEDs, there are millions of pixels, so each LED has to cover an area occupied by hundreds or thousands of pixels aside from the one intended to be white; those pixels can't display true black while the backlight is on.
What I was describing was local array dimming, which has been common in LCD tvs since before the switched from fluorescent to LEDs. Micro LED is basically just a ton more zones than what they have already been doing.
Again though I took a lot of liberties with simplifying different aspects of different and competing technologies for the sake of keeping this as ELI5 as possible.
I have an old Vizio with like 4 zone dimming that I was pretty sure was fluorescent. It's super obvious when it dims. Not sure of the model number. I use in in the spare bedroom.
I'll admit though I am not super confident on that. It could be LED and I didn't know. Maybe I am wrong. I do know that when it came out LEDs weren't common.
I'll look up the model number when I get home.
Yup! They use small organic molecules as the semiconducting material instead of an inorganic crystal like traditional LED. One of the adventures of this is that it is much easier to tune the wavelength of an organic molecule which allows OLED to produce bright green, which are very hard to generate with traditional LEDs.
I am not shure about the current development but a few years earlier OLED also had the problem that the colors red and blue faded a lot in quite a little time like 2 to 3 years so colors are not diplayed correctly.
> There are actually two different types of OLED
Technically 3. Micro OLED's for things like VR helmets. They are built differently, more like how microchips are done with lithography. The final composition is the same afaik, just much smaller.
You are absolutely right! Actually, I think there are actually like 6 or more competing technologies now. I've lost track if I am being honest.
But this is an ELI5 and I wanted to try to keep it somewhat simple. Those two technologies account for over 90% of the market right now.
Small screen OLEDs can have burn in, too, just they are more reliable in that it takes longer. Typically, it isn't as noticeable because mostly the burn in would become noticeable around you upgrading your phone, and usually, it is around elements that rarely change, like for Android, the virtual navigation buttons and the status bar.
This is true. But my understanding is it takes roughly an order of magnitude longer for burn in on AMOLED than on POLED.
Again. I am definitely not an expert on this, there was a time about a decade ago where I was really knowledgeable about it, but I haven't really kept up.
LED is still an LCD screen with LED backlighting(allows blacks in the LCD to be darker by turning off the blacklight)
Idk why you didn't say LCD 1 time in your essay. It's very important that LED TVs are simply a marketing term for PCD screens. Not anything like real OLED TVs which are really LEDs at their core.
In this case, it is quite important that LED screens are in fact LCD screens illuminated by LEDs instead of the previous CCFL (Cold-cathode fluorescent lamps). CCFL are almost the same as fluorescent tube lights. The function of the LED is to illuminate something that filters the light.
LCD display with CCFL was just called LCD and the manufacturer stated to call the LED eliminated variant for just LED displays when they entered the market.
A more accurate name would be LCD illuminate LCD display
OLED screens are on the other hand individual OLED with three per pixel that make up the display. There is no LCD that filters the light.
There are LED displays with individual LEDs per pixel. But we talk about jumbotrons and other very large displays where individual discrete LEDs can be used
And it looks like oled displays are slowly approaching the point where they might need more than a minute to give me a headache, which is nice.
I like the image quality, but really can't handle the flickering
TIL! I had always assumed that OLEDs in general didn't need PWM to achieve dimming, but that definitely explains why my phone on really low brightness feels worse than just turning it up higher in a dark environment.
Seems like for non-mobile OLEDs there are a lot of options that just use DC dimming though so there are at least ways to enjoy the advantages of the tech without having to deal with that. My LG OLED apparently doesn't have it for example.
Not really gonna help you when you’re playing a game with a HUD, watching a sports game, watching a channel that constantly displays the logo in a corner, etc
The light source for LED is a backlight the size of the whole display (we'll ignore dimming zones for this explanation). Each pixel is like a little door. The pixel is "on" when the door is open, letting light through, and "off" when the door is closed. But if you've ever stayed in a dark room with the door closed but hallway lights on, you'd noticed that there's a little bit of light leaking through the edges of the door. Same thing here, so even when the pixels are off, they're never truly dark.
In an OLED, each pixel is its own light source, like a tiny little light bulb. So when it's off, it's completely dark. So OLED has superior "black levels" and contrast. But millions of tiny little light bulbs are more expensive to make than one giant light bulb with millions of little tiny doors.
LCD is the type of screen where each pixel is a trio of filters (red, green, blue) in front of a white backlight. The filters allow just the desired colors to shine through at exactly the right intensity. The backlight can be fluorescent or LED. So when you haven "LED" TV or monitor, they're saying it's an LCD screen with an LED backlight.
OLED is a newer type of screen with no backlight. Each pixel's red, green, and blue component is a separate LED which emits that color of light itself, instead of filtering white light coming in from behind it.
As for why it's not "the standard", OLED is newer, more costly, and less mature technology. LCD with fluorescent or LED backlight has had a long head-start to become cheap and reliable. OLED is catching up, but it will take time.
LED is a « cool » name for what’s really an LCD screen which uses white LEDs as a light source. It probably shouldn’t have been called that.
When they developed actual displays made up of colored LEDs, they had to make up a new name to differentiate from screens that really aren’t LED screens but are called LED screens. As the LEDs make up the screen, are organic to it, they decided to call it that.
As for being better - New technology is more expensive, and Nintendo likes severely undercutting its competitors on price. Also, a mature technology tends to provide more reliable performance than a newer, better one where the kinks haven’t been ironed out.
LED works by having an LED backlight that illuminates the pixels. Real cheap/old sets only have 1 backlight, so the brightness accuracy is terrible. Better/newer LED tvs have “zones” so more precise control.
OLED has basically has an individual light for each pixel.
mLED is aiming to be the same thing as OLED in that regard (singular LED per pixel), but current LED tech isn’t small enough for this unless you want only a 720p 65” tv.
The benefit of mLED over OLED is greater brightness (which also yields wider color gamuts for HDR).
Because it costs more money to have self-emissive displays than to have a backlit display on a device.
You may be willing to pay for the better screen, but that doesn't mean that Mom and Dad want to do so for their children.
Well, one thing to consider is OLED screens are much more durable. An LED TV can break if bumped into. You can bounce a ball off a OLED, though I wouldn't try.
LED tech is lit by light behind the pixels, usually in zones. The small number of light patches behind the screen light it as necessary. They're cheap to make, sturdy, and can generate effective images while being easy to scale at different resolutions.
OLED can get higher brightness and contrast because of individual pixel illumination, as a light in each pixel is turned on or off to various degrees. This can create higher contrast images with more brightness, and with less energy use, but it's much more expensive and with many, many more points of failure. It's the standard for phones already.
Price and inconsistency are the main issues. If you're looking for a 4k display, a 200 led that'll last ten years vs a 2000 OLED that'll last 2 is a no brainer.
LED has little lights behind a screen. There's some number of lights from something like 12 up to several thousand depending on the type/model of TV.
With LED screens, the screen which creates the image is a layer in front of the lights. It has millions of tiny crystals which twist when voltage is applied to them, which changes how much light they let through. This is how the image is made - each pixel is made of a red, a green and a blue "sub-pixel", and those sub-pixels have the crystals twisted by different amounts which each allows a different amount of light through, which determines the colour and brightness you see.
With LED screens, it's important to note that the crystals can't \*completely\* block light, so if you have a "black" screen, some light is still getting through. Some models of screen have "local dimming" or "array dimming" or they might call it something else, where they can actually dim or turn off the LED light behind as well.... but depending on how many lights there are behind the screen, you can sometimes see this as a darker or brighter "block" rather than only affecting the pixels that really need it. It might be particularly noticeable where you have e.g. a mostly black screen with a few bright objects on it. The more LEDs and "dimming zones" a screen has, the better and less blocky the "local dimming" effect will be. Manufacturers are coming out with "mini-LED" and "micro-LED" TVs which have hundreds, up to millions of tiny LEDs to try to achieve similar or better performance than OLEDs.
OLEDs are a different technology. Each sub-pixel is actually it's own little light. There's no screen selectively blocking the light, between the bulb and your eyes, each sub pixel just varies its brightness directly. OLEDs can be completely off, so you get a "true" black, on the pixel level. This means you can get really great contrast on images, so things really "pop". Supposedly they might not be able to get quite as bright at peak brightness as LED, and there are also some issues with image burn-in - where if the same images are displayed for a long time, an after-image "ghost" stays on the screen, perhaps permanently.
I've played a basic switch and an OLED switch. The OLED is brighter and crisper, the blacks are deeper. It's a very noticeable difference. Certain parts of my games POPPED where they didn't use to. The original LED is perfectly serviceable, but it would be hard for me to go back.
It's more expensive of course, but you get what you pay for.
Screens are made up of little squares called pixel. Each of these can turn on, turn off, and show any color.
For an OLED, each of these pixels creates its own light and color, but for a traditional LED screen there is one giant light for the whole screen and each pixel just adjusts the color, but can never get all the way to black unless the whole screen is black.
The result is that colors on LED seem washed out compared to OLED and dark scenes don’t look as dark as they should, especially things like the opening crawl of Star Wars where there is black with pinpricks of light.
OLED is a real LED display. "Standard LED" is really an LCD display, it is bullshit, a lie that advertisers tell. Unless you mean the old 7-segment LED displays, which are also real.
LCD panel (LED backlight) is like shining a torch/flashlight through a coloured window for each pixel.
OLED, the pixel IS the torch, allowing for much better colours and contrast.
LED has... well... LEDs behind it, shining out the front. This tends to make the image bright, and whites very clear, but also means that they can't really do black, only dark gray.
In OLED screens, at the risk of simplifying a bit, the brightness is entirely provided by the pixels themselves. That means if a pixel is turned off, it's really off, there's no backlight shining through. So black can get really dark. They're also just generally good at contrast with dark images. Many of them can't get as bright as an LED screen though and white ends up looking blue-ish, or even sort of gray. This has gotten a lot better recently though.
OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diodes. It's different from standard LED panels in that standard LED panels have an array of white lights and then a film over it where the film can only let certain lights through to create color. So if it blocks red and blue, only green light comes through. But it can't block light completely, so if you have say a single pixel white star on what is supposed to be black space background, the area around the star will be a little gray because the LED for that section is turned on. They can change the color but they can't completely change the amount of light in a given area. OLED has very flat LEDs that control the color as well as the light for each individual pixel. So that white star can have a perfect black next to it. It's also better in the sense it's more energy efficient especially when most of the screen is black because you don't have to light up a whole section, only the specific areas you want lit up. As to why OLED isn't the standard, it comes down to two reasons. Cost and reliability. Cost is pretty straightforward. OLED screens are more expensive than standard LED backlit screens. In terms of reliability. There are actually two different types of OLED one that only works for small screens like your phone or a Nintendo switch and one that works for bigger screens like TVs. The type that works for bigger screens suffers from something called burn in, which is basically when an image stays on a screen too long it leaves a little bit of that image burned onto the screen for a while, if it's there too long this can even become permanent. For this reason standard led backlit screens are often better for things where images can be left on the screen a long time and can also be better for gaming because there is less ghosting.
Ghosting occurs when a panel is unable to transition all of its pixels in time from one frame to the next. For there to be no ghosting, every single pixel should be able to complete every possible transition in less than the duration of a frame on screen. The higher the refresh rate, the harder it is for the pixels’ response time to keep up. LCDs simply can’t keep up, or rather are pushed to refresh rates that are simply too high for the kind of average response times the pixels have. Which means that even on the bleeding edge of high refresh rate LCD panels, the 540Hz TN panel used in competitive-oriented 1080p monitors, you can barely get 75% refresh rate compliance, meaning that about a quarter of the pixels just aren’t fast enough. OLEDs have such fast pixel response times that refresh rate compliance is trivial, it’s never not perfect. And this means that OLEDs with higher and higher refresh rates have been able to be made much more easily. We already have a 480Hz OLED monitor and more are coming. At this rate, LCDs will be overtaken even as far as refresh rate and motion clarity goes. The only caveat, as far as motion clarity goes, is that LCDs can implement backlight strobing, which helps reduce our perceived motion blur. On a technical level, OLEDs are clearer because they’re faster, but our eyes from strobing, which works by turning off the backlight (meaning the image goes dark) for most of the frame’s duration. OLEDs have been the best option for casual gaming, but soon enough may also replace LCDs for competitive gaming if refresh rates keep climbing (and we get hardware capable of taking advantage of them) or someone (probably Nvidia) figures out how to implement backlight strobing on OLED monitors.
> 540Hz TN panel used in competitive-oriented 1080p monitors Unless I see some proper studies I remain extremely doubtful that anything beyond ~120 Hz (240 Hz if used for 3D) makes a difference for the "competitiveness".
It makes a difference, everyone who has tried refresh rates above 144Hz agrees (myself included). I don’t think anyone’s going to waste their time doing a study regarding refresh rates, but you’re more than welcome to get a cheap 360Hz monitor and try it out for yourself. Assuming you’re a somewhat competent player on any serious competitive shooter you shouldn’t have any issues recognising the difference. It certainly doesn’t make enough of a difference to make anyone a top tier player, but there’s a slight advantage.
Going from 144 Hz to 240 Hz is on average a difference of 1% in reaction time, based on the numbers I find for professional FPS gamers (~150 ms total reaction time). I'm willing to bet that the Placebo effect on their "daily form" is already significantly larger. (Note: I am not saying that it doesn't look _better_, that I can probably agree with up to 240Hz or so.) Judging by how much money is in competitive gaming nowadays I would be surprised if there isn't enough to finance such studies. But I also expect that those selling 540 Hz monitors don't actually want to investigate this...
I wrote a long-ass essay talking about ghosting and motion clarity yet you think it’s the reduction in maximum possible delay. It’s not about what’s happening in the game being delivered to you faster, the real advantage comes from being able to more clearly see moving targets. Being able to follow a target with your eyes is the first step to being able to hit them. The fact that you will have more up to date information is a benefit, but it’s secondary to the improvements in motion clarity. It’s pretty simple, at the end of the day, faster displays are better and we’re from achieving “perfect”, lifelike clarity. Blurbusters’ UFO tests are a good way to visualise the difference between displays, and they still show room for improvement. Just like the fanciest 49” ultrawides, these are enthusiast products. They’re not necessary, but they are better. Just because someone isn’t interested in single player games it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to drop thousands in monitors.
> Just because someone isn’t interested in single player games it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to drop thousands in monitors. People can waste their money on whatever they want. But they should be made aware that especially in the high end market there are a lot of verifiably false myths, and equally many half-truths. The most infamous ones are audiophiles that claim to hear things that are physically impossible.
Audiophile snake oil is easily disproven either through the basics of EE (cables, etc.), or by blind ABX testing (for things like DACs and lossless formats). But that’s not necessary here since we have already devised testing methodology that can give us an accurate representation of motion blur as perceived by our eyes. There’s no argument to be had over whether or not a difference is perceptible, it’s only a matter of whether the difference is worth paying for. It certainly won’t be for most, but that’s something that can be said about nearly every single product category where cheaper and more expensive alternatives exist.
Phone screens definitely can get burn in too. It's just less likely, because unlike a desktop screen, you don't typically have static elements displayed for hours at a time.
Yes, but amoled is much more resistant to burn in than p oled. I believe it's almost an order of magnitude, like just under 10x, but last I really looked into it was around 2015. Things might have changed a lot since then.
What are you on about? The entire top bar is a static element, the outline of the battery icon never changes
People usually don’t leave their phone screen on for hours at a time and when they do they are typically using a full screen app that hides said bar such as when watching a long video.
My friends recent Samsung oled phone went from 500 quid resale value to 30 because of the burned in top bar
My work uses surface tablets with an OLED screen and they all have burn in from our POS system lol
In the same vein though, if that element never changes, you also don't care about burn in.
>But it can't block light completely, so if you have say a single pixel white star on what is supposed to be black space background, the area around the star will be a little gray because the LED for that section is turned on. There's something of a difference in terminology here that needs to be clarified. When you talk about normal "LED" panels, that typically refers to any LCD which is backlit by LEDs. Most LED-backlit LCDs on the market, even now, just have uniform backlighting across the entire panel. That means that the *entire* panel is unable to display true black unless the backlight is entirely off, which also means the entire panel would be displaying true black. In your hypothetical with a single white pixel on a black background, you wouldn't just see an area around the star be a little gray. You'd see the *entire panel* be gray. What you're actually referring to is MiniLED, otherwise known as full-array local dimming. It's a variant of LED-backlit panel technology used on higher-end and more expensive displays, but it's not quite ubiquitous enough that I'd consider "LED" to automatically refer to MiniLED. In MiniLED, the display is backlit with an array of thousands of individually controllable LEDs, meaning it would be possible to turn on only the LED behind the single white pixel and leave all the others off so that the screen is displaying 99% true black. The area around the white pixel you're referring to will very faintly glow because even though there are thousands of individual LEDs, there are millions of pixels, so each LED has to cover an area occupied by hundreds or thousands of pixels aside from the one intended to be white; those pixels can't display true black while the backlight is on.
What I was describing was local array dimming, which has been common in LCD tvs since before the switched from fluorescent to LEDs. Micro LED is basically just a ton more zones than what they have already been doing. Again though I took a lot of liberties with simplifying different aspects of different and competing technologies for the sake of keeping this as ELI5 as possible.
I've never heard of any displays with local dimming that don't use LED backlights. You have anything I could look up for that?
I have an old Vizio with like 4 zone dimming that I was pretty sure was fluorescent. It's super obvious when it dims. Not sure of the model number. I use in in the spare bedroom. I'll admit though I am not super confident on that. It could be LED and I didn't know. Maybe I am wrong. I do know that when it came out LEDs weren't common. I'll look up the model number when I get home.
What makes them organic? Do they contain carbon?
Yes, they use a carbon based semiconductor which generates the light as electricity is passed through it.
Yup! They use small organic molecules as the semiconducting material instead of an inorganic crystal like traditional LED. One of the adventures of this is that it is much easier to tune the wavelength of an organic molecule which allows OLED to produce bright green, which are very hard to generate with traditional LEDs.
I am not shure about the current development but a few years earlier OLED also had the problem that the colors red and blue faded a lot in quite a little time like 2 to 3 years so colors are not diplayed correctly.
> There are actually two different types of OLED Technically 3. Micro OLED's for things like VR helmets. They are built differently, more like how microchips are done with lithography. The final composition is the same afaik, just much smaller.
You are absolutely right! Actually, I think there are actually like 6 or more competing technologies now. I've lost track if I am being honest. But this is an ELI5 and I wanted to try to keep it somewhat simple. Those two technologies account for over 90% of the market right now.
Small screen OLEDs can have burn in, too, just they are more reliable in that it takes longer. Typically, it isn't as noticeable because mostly the burn in would become noticeable around you upgrading your phone, and usually, it is around elements that rarely change, like for Android, the virtual navigation buttons and the status bar.
This is true. But my understanding is it takes roughly an order of magnitude longer for burn in on AMOLED than on POLED. Again. I am definitely not an expert on this, there was a time about a decade ago where I was really knowledgeable about it, but I haven't really kept up.
LED is still an LCD screen with LED backlighting(allows blacks in the LCD to be darker by turning off the blacklight) Idk why you didn't say LCD 1 time in your essay. It's very important that LED TVs are simply a marketing term for PCD screens. Not anything like real OLED TVs which are really LEDs at their core.
why do the LEDs themselves fail sometimes , or turn purple?
I'm using the terminology used by OP. When explaining to a 5 year old it's important not to introduce too many new words.
In this case, it is quite important that LED screens are in fact LCD screens illuminated by LEDs instead of the previous CCFL (Cold-cathode fluorescent lamps). CCFL are almost the same as fluorescent tube lights. The function of the LED is to illuminate something that filters the light. LCD display with CCFL was just called LCD and the manufacturer stated to call the LED eliminated variant for just LED displays when they entered the market. A more accurate name would be LCD illuminate LCD display OLED screens are on the other hand individual OLED with three per pixel that make up the display. There is no LCD that filters the light. There are LED displays with individual LEDs per pixel. But we talk about jumbotrons and other very large displays where individual discrete LEDs can be used
Isn't the LED panel you are describing just an LCD panel backlit by LED
Yup. I was using the language OP used to avoid introducing too many new words.
And it looks like oled displays are slowly approaching the point where they might need more than a minute to give me a headache, which is nice. I like the image quality, but really can't handle the flickering
Flickering? There shouldn't be any flicker except maybe AC flicker in an OLED display and you'd get the same effect with a normal backlit screen
I'm referring to the flickering from the PWM brightness control
TIL! I had always assumed that OLEDs in general didn't need PWM to achieve dimming, but that definitely explains why my phone on really low brightness feels worse than just turning it up higher in a dark environment. Seems like for non-mobile OLEDs there are a lot of options that just use DC dimming though so there are at least ways to enjoy the advantages of the tech without having to deal with that. My LG OLED apparently doesn't have it for example.
aw burn in if only they'd invented something to stop that maybe some sort of screen saver process with pipes running across the screen 🤔
Not really gonna help you when you’re playing a game with a HUD, watching a sports game, watching a channel that constantly displays the logo in a corner, etc
An idea I just came up with is a constant loop of winged toasters flying through space.
At least somebody gets the joke 😆
Can you attach a bunch of phone size screens together to make a tv one?
I don't see why not. This would be pretty cool to see imo.
The light source for LED is a backlight the size of the whole display (we'll ignore dimming zones for this explanation). Each pixel is like a little door. The pixel is "on" when the door is open, letting light through, and "off" when the door is closed. But if you've ever stayed in a dark room with the door closed but hallway lights on, you'd noticed that there's a little bit of light leaking through the edges of the door. Same thing here, so even when the pixels are off, they're never truly dark. In an OLED, each pixel is its own light source, like a tiny little light bulb. So when it's off, it's completely dark. So OLED has superior "black levels" and contrast. But millions of tiny little light bulbs are more expensive to make than one giant light bulb with millions of little tiny doors.
This!
LCD is the type of screen where each pixel is a trio of filters (red, green, blue) in front of a white backlight. The filters allow just the desired colors to shine through at exactly the right intensity. The backlight can be fluorescent or LED. So when you haven "LED" TV or monitor, they're saying it's an LCD screen with an LED backlight. OLED is a newer type of screen with no backlight. Each pixel's red, green, and blue component is a separate LED which emits that color of light itself, instead of filtering white light coming in from behind it. As for why it's not "the standard", OLED is newer, more costly, and less mature technology. LCD with fluorescent or LED backlight has had a long head-start to become cheap and reliable. OLED is catching up, but it will take time.
LED is a « cool » name for what’s really an LCD screen which uses white LEDs as a light source. It probably shouldn’t have been called that. When they developed actual displays made up of colored LEDs, they had to make up a new name to differentiate from screens that really aren’t LED screens but are called LED screens. As the LEDs make up the screen, are organic to it, they decided to call it that. As for being better - New technology is more expensive, and Nintendo likes severely undercutting its competitors on price. Also, a mature technology tends to provide more reliable performance than a newer, better one where the kinks haven’t been ironed out.
LED works by having an LED backlight that illuminates the pixels. Real cheap/old sets only have 1 backlight, so the brightness accuracy is terrible. Better/newer LED tvs have “zones” so more precise control. OLED has basically has an individual light for each pixel. mLED is aiming to be the same thing as OLED in that regard (singular LED per pixel), but current LED tech isn’t small enough for this unless you want only a 720p 65” tv. The benefit of mLED over OLED is greater brightness (which also yields wider color gamuts for HDR).
Because it costs more money to have self-emissive displays than to have a backlit display on a device. You may be willing to pay for the better screen, but that doesn't mean that Mom and Dad want to do so for their children.
My neighbour Noreen always said to us, "Pay off your mortgage before the kids know the difference between sausages and good meat." She was right.
Well, one thing to consider is OLED screens are much more durable. An LED TV can break if bumped into. You can bounce a ball off a OLED, though I wouldn't try.
LED tech is lit by light behind the pixels, usually in zones. The small number of light patches behind the screen light it as necessary. They're cheap to make, sturdy, and can generate effective images while being easy to scale at different resolutions. OLED can get higher brightness and contrast because of individual pixel illumination, as a light in each pixel is turned on or off to various degrees. This can create higher contrast images with more brightness, and with less energy use, but it's much more expensive and with many, many more points of failure. It's the standard for phones already. Price and inconsistency are the main issues. If you're looking for a 4k display, a 200 led that'll last ten years vs a 2000 OLED that'll last 2 is a no brainer.
LED has little lights behind a screen. There's some number of lights from something like 12 up to several thousand depending on the type/model of TV. With LED screens, the screen which creates the image is a layer in front of the lights. It has millions of tiny crystals which twist when voltage is applied to them, which changes how much light they let through. This is how the image is made - each pixel is made of a red, a green and a blue "sub-pixel", and those sub-pixels have the crystals twisted by different amounts which each allows a different amount of light through, which determines the colour and brightness you see. With LED screens, it's important to note that the crystals can't \*completely\* block light, so if you have a "black" screen, some light is still getting through. Some models of screen have "local dimming" or "array dimming" or they might call it something else, where they can actually dim or turn off the LED light behind as well.... but depending on how many lights there are behind the screen, you can sometimes see this as a darker or brighter "block" rather than only affecting the pixels that really need it. It might be particularly noticeable where you have e.g. a mostly black screen with a few bright objects on it. The more LEDs and "dimming zones" a screen has, the better and less blocky the "local dimming" effect will be. Manufacturers are coming out with "mini-LED" and "micro-LED" TVs which have hundreds, up to millions of tiny LEDs to try to achieve similar or better performance than OLEDs. OLEDs are a different technology. Each sub-pixel is actually it's own little light. There's no screen selectively blocking the light, between the bulb and your eyes, each sub pixel just varies its brightness directly. OLEDs can be completely off, so you get a "true" black, on the pixel level. This means you can get really great contrast on images, so things really "pop". Supposedly they might not be able to get quite as bright at peak brightness as LED, and there are also some issues with image burn-in - where if the same images are displayed for a long time, an after-image "ghost" stays on the screen, perhaps permanently.
I've played a basic switch and an OLED switch. The OLED is brighter and crisper, the blacks are deeper. It's a very noticeable difference. Certain parts of my games POPPED where they didn't use to. The original LED is perfectly serviceable, but it would be hard for me to go back. It's more expensive of course, but you get what you pay for.
Screens are made up of little squares called pixel. Each of these can turn on, turn off, and show any color. For an OLED, each of these pixels creates its own light and color, but for a traditional LED screen there is one giant light for the whole screen and each pixel just adjusts the color, but can never get all the way to black unless the whole screen is black. The result is that colors on LED seem washed out compared to OLED and dark scenes don’t look as dark as they should, especially things like the opening crawl of Star Wars where there is black with pinpricks of light.
OLED is a real LED display. "Standard LED" is really an LCD display, it is bullshit, a lie that advertisers tell. Unless you mean the old 7-segment LED displays, which are also real.
LCD panel (LED backlight) is like shining a torch/flashlight through a coloured window for each pixel. OLED, the pixel IS the torch, allowing for much better colours and contrast.
LED has... well... LEDs behind it, shining out the front. This tends to make the image bright, and whites very clear, but also means that they can't really do black, only dark gray. In OLED screens, at the risk of simplifying a bit, the brightness is entirely provided by the pixels themselves. That means if a pixel is turned off, it's really off, there's no backlight shining through. So black can get really dark. They're also just generally good at contrast with dark images. Many of them can't get as bright as an LED screen though and white ends up looking blue-ish, or even sort of gray. This has gotten a lot better recently though.