• tal@lemmy.today
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    3 days ago

    It does matter, but there are drawbacks and advantages each way.

    My current monitor is LCD. When I bought it, that was because OLED prices were significantly higher.

    I like the look of the inky blacks on OLEDs. I really love using the things in the dark.

    If you’re using a portable device, OLED can save a fair bit of power if you tend to have darker pixels on the screen, since OLED power consumption varies more-significantly based on what’s onscreen. I use dark mode interfaces, so I’m generally better-off from a pure power consumption standpoint with OLED.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRT,_LCD,_plasma,_and_OLED_displays

    OLED displays use 40% of the power of an LCD displaying an image that is primarily black as they lack the need for a backlight,[35] while OLED can use more than three times as much power to display a mostly white image compared to an LCD.

    OLEDs are more prone to burn-in than LCDs, but my understanding is that newer OLEDs have significantly improved on this. And it takes a long time for that to happen.

    Aside from price, I’d mostly come down on the side of OLED. However, there is one significant issue that I was not aware of at the time I was picking a monitor that I think people should be aware of. As far as I can tell from what I’ve read, present-day OLED displays have controllers that don’t deal well with VRR (variable refresh rate, like Freesync or Gsync). That is, if you’re using VRR on your OLED monitor and the frame rate is shifting around, you will see some level of brightness fluctuation. For people who don’t make use of VRR, that may not matter. I don’t really care about VRR in video games, but I do care about it to get precise frame timings when watching movies, so I’d rather, all else held equal, have a monitor that doesn’t have VRR issues, since I have VRR enabled. If I didn’t care about that, I’d probably just turn VRR off and not worry about it.

    EDIT:

    https://www.displayninja.com/what-is-vrr-brightness-flickering/

      • Sixty@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        No brightness issues here with LG QLED.

        There’s of course the limitations of VRR itself and the implementation. Freesync only works within a frame rate range.

        I’ve seen strobe/flicker when it’s too low.

        I cap my GPU to 108FPS to prevent tearing, I leave VRR always on.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        3 days ago

        I’ve never really wanted to get a QLED monitor, so I haven’t spent time looking at their VRR behavior; sorry. I imagine that there’s material out there about it, though.