Be careful what you ask for – you might just get it. So it goes with screen technology of late. We’ve been clamouring for something better than an LCD panel with a big, dumb backlight for years. Now we’ve got it, and it turns out – in some ways, at least – that conventional LCD monitors aren’t so bad after all.
The new entrants on the display scene are, of course, mini-LED and OLED. Mini-LED screens are actually a subset of LCD displays, not a new category of panel tech. But they do represent a significant step change. OLED, meanwhile, has taken its time transitioning from the TV market to PC monitors. But it is a radical new technology and has finally arrived in desktop monitors.
On paper, both offer dramatic advantages over conventional LCD displays. At last, you can have true HDR performance, per-pixel lighting, rapid response times and several other hitherto unobtainable screen attributes.
In practice, however, they are turning out to be rather more problematic than initially predicted.
Put it this way: we’ve seen numerous examples of the latest mini-LED and OLED monitors, and we’re not sure we’d take any of them over the best available conventional LCD panels.
There are a couple of caveats to that, which we’ll come to. But along the way, we need to identify what exactly the problems with mini-LED and OLED monitors are, ask if they can be fixed and consider if there are any alternative technologies that entirely sidestep all the issues. Let’s get to it.
We’ve mentioned this before in previous issues, but LCD is a fundamentally borked technology when it comes to displaying full colour motion images. In fact, it’s so bad that you have to give credit to the engineers who polished what is ultimately a flat panel turd into the dominant display tech it has become today.
So let’s start by recounting the many ways in which LCD technology is unsuitable for use as a modern display solution for computing. For a start, it’s transmissive rather than emissive, meaning that you need a separate light source to push photons through the pixels.
This is problematic on several levels. First, you have to choose between a single big, dumb backlight and something more complex that allows some
