OLED displays are overrated
We are just weeks away from the iPhone X launch. Remember the time rumors about it first appeared? Everyone said it was the ‘OLED, bezelless iPhone’. It is the OLED iPhone that crushed the sales of iPhone 8/Plus. They sell less than the iPhone 7 right now. How did it get such big hype?
In May 2017, Andy Rubin announced the Essential Phone, and it also had the ‘notch’ iPhone X has, but it did that using an LCD display. The software on Essential also tries to hide the notch by making the area black when playing a video or looking at a photo. iPhone X doesn’t even want to hide the notch, it doesn’t even have a dark mode. So there is no obvious reason to choose OLED, right? That’s where the OLED hype comes in.
The first time I saw an OLED panel was about ten years ago in a local Best Buy. It was a very small (maybe 10 inch) television made by Sony. The picture was not anything better than the sea of televisions there, it was grainy and colors were muted; it nearly felt like the old CRT TVs. One thing separated it from the other displays though: the contrast ratio was ridiculously good. It had unprecedented blacks. That’s one of the biggest factors that caused OLED to rise. OLED had other advantages as well. The panels could be super-thin, efficiency was uncomparable to LCD, it could reach a higher peak brightness, and the colors could be much more vibrant.
It took some time for the LED panels to catch up, and that’s where OLED’s weaknesses showed themselves the most. Earlier OLED panels, and still nearly all of them, tend to burn in. Producers tried different techniques to prevent this from happening, yet it’s still not resolved. Another problem is the viewing angles. There are some OLED displays with good viewing angles, and some with notoriously bad. I put this into test with some devices I have, and the result I got was that OLEDs tend to be very blue when looked at from a non-direct angle. Out of many devices I had, the ones with the worst viewing angles were the Apple Watch (1st gen) and MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (not the screen). When I looked at an iPad or an IPS monitor from the same angles, they remained perfectly fine. Not even one pixel has changed colors.
To further test the ‘OLED is better’ hypothesis, I went to a store with lots of televisions and chose an LG OLED TV and a Samsung QLED TV. The difference was obvious only when it came to blacks, and it was noticable, but not huge. The viewing angles were very good with both of them, but there was some awkward color shift with the OLED when looked from some certain angle. When they were turned all the way up, the brightness of the QLED was just a little more. Whites were slightly off in both models, but it has to do with the front layer of the panel. Also, the response time on the OLED was just a bit better. Don’t take this as praising LCD though. QLED is NOT better than OLED, and vice versa. They both have flaws.
Recently, there have been mentions of a new technology for displays: MicroLED. Apple was rumored to do this with the Series 3 Watch, but it stuck with the OLED panel; probably they couldn’t manage to produce it in time. MicroLED basically takes the best of both worlds: it doesn’t have the many problems OLED has. There is no burn in or color shifting; but it still can reach a substentially high peak brightness as well as perfect blacks. There isn’t a legit reason for anyone to not use this technology. It is efficient, thin, and its colors can be more accurate than anything else. Its lack of popularity is mainly because OLED is overhyped and LCD is cheaper to produce. And, if that remains the case, we will see lots of inaccurate displays that give you an eyesore before OLED hype dies, like the bezelless hype is going to.
