Are you one of those who think that 240Hz panels are just a placebo? That more than 120 Hz is no longer needed? Or maybe 60 Hz is enough for you? You don’t have to be a gamer to know the difference. We will take a detailed look at what OLED displays have the ultimate advantage over liquid crystals.
I got my hands on the recently introduced one for a while monitor from Asus labeled ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM. Its basic parameters, such as a 26.5″ diagonal, a resolution of 2560 × 1440 pixels or HDR support, won’t impress anyone today, but the refresh rate of 240 Hz will make gamers sharper, and when you add the fact that it’s an OLED, even more demanding players salivate.
Most parameters are impressive, some are an order of magnitude different from LCD:
Diagonal (inches): 26.5″ Aspect ratio : 16:9 Color range (DCI-P3) : 99% Color range (sRGB) : 135% Panel type : OLED Resolution : 2560 x 1440 Display area (H x W) : 590, 4 × 333.7 mm Display surface: Non-Glare Dot pitch: 0.229 mm Brightness (Max): 450 cd/m² Brightness (HDR, Peak): 1,000 cd/m² Contrast ratio: 1,500,000:1 Viewing angles (CR≧10): 178° / 178° Response time: 0.03 ms (GTG) Colors: 1073.7 M (10 bit) Flicker free technology: Yes HDR (High Dynamic Range) support: HDR10 Refresh rate (max.): 240 Hz
Unfortunately, almost the same can be said about the price, it starts below 29 thousand crowns. I don’t plan to do a review on it directly, I don’t have the equipment for it, and I don’t have it, among other things, because I don’t want to do monitor reviews. You can already find reviews of this monitor on the Internet, very detailed must be at rtings.com.
I don’t even want to dissect all the features of the monitor and solve the disadvantages of OLED, which are also plenty – I’ll just take them telegraphically so that it doesn’t seem like everything is so rosy with it. The biggest scare with OLED is image burn-in and the various techniques to reduce it (such as periodically shifting the image by one pixel, screen savers, the display “refresh” procedure, and more).
The overall brightness is also a problem, which tends to be lower than that of high-end LCDs, especially those with true HDR – while the backlighting of classic LCDs can be fully washed out over the entire surface, OLED displays often have a maximum brightness (usually around 1000 cd/m²), which but the display cannot light up the entire surface. The reason given is that the panel would have a high consumption in such a case, because of which the display would heat up even more, and this in turn accelerates the degradation of the image cells.
Therefore, OLED displays tend to have a kind of “balancing” of light intensity – small bright areas can be displayed with maximum brightness, but the larger the bright areas in the image, the lower their brightness. If you only show a white area over the entire screen, the white will not shine like a small white square in the middle of a dark screen.
Somewhat different pixels
Manufacturers are trying to increase the brightness of the pixels as much as possible – for example, by combining OLED with atypical triangular subpixels recolored using quantum dots, as in QD-OLED, or by using four-color pixels, which in addition to the classic red, green and blue, also have a white subpixel. In the panel used by Asus and behind which LG should stand, in addition to white being squeezed into the pixel, the order of colors was also mixed up, the subpixel has an arrangement – RWBG.
In the case of this monitor, all four subpixels are never lit at the same time, the color of a pixel is always composed of only three of the four components. I made a special grid for this with a color gradient in single pixel points, which you can see (at 300% magnification) on the left. On the right, you can see a photo of how the monitor interprets the colors.
The atypical pixel arrangement means that ClearType won’t work properly in Windows, and the font will look a little weirder than on an LCD. I discussed in detail why this is a problem in an earlier article dedicated specifically to how ClearType anti-aliasing works.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is still obviously not very excited about such trifles as the fact that LCDs with BGR or RGB pixels have not been on the market for several years – the new icons are visible immediately, while you have to take a microscope to those subpixels, right? Even so, the RWGB subpixels disturb them significantly less than the purple-green aura of QD-OLEDs with triangular subpixels; the writing just seems a little less sharp – and the anti-reflective coating plays a part in that. Because of it, it looks as if the display is behind a layer of thick glass on the (Chinese USB microscope for three hundred).
Pixely RWGB u monitoru Asus ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM
It’s hard to say if anyone from Microsoft is going to address this anytime soon, but at least it seems that on Github in the Microsoft PowerToys discussion a resistance group of OLED owners is emerging.
What OLED loses in brightness, it gains in contrast. If a white LED is continuously lit under the LCD display, the black is not as black as with OLED, where nothing is lit under the black surface. LCDs can combat this by dimming the backlight locally. It’s fine for movies or games, but if you have a solid dark surface on which a white cursor moves, the backlit zones are huge, and it’s only better with much more expensive panels with mini LEDs.
For LCDs with tiled zone backlights, you can observe effects similar to the one in the following (slightly overexposed) photo in dim lighting – zones that have the backlight turned on because there is something bright on them, such as a small window or a cursor, the backlight shines through under the black surface .
Local dimming on a classic LCD
And these tiles are even more golden than the panels, which have LEDs only around the perimeter and instead of a spot around the cursor, a strip lights up on the monitor under the cursor from top to bottom.
There is no risk of something similar with OLED displays, because only what is really supposed to be lit is lit on them. And I’d rather not even mention the viewing angles, which are incredible compared to LCD, so that we can finally get to what I want to address today, which is the response.
A separate article could be written about each of the mentioned problems. Today, I will focus on just one thing – refresh rate and pixel response, and I will try to explain to everyone who cannot see 240Hz OLED with their own eyes, how 240Hz OLED differs from a regular 60Hz LED and how it behaves in practice.
2023-07-27 17:06:41
#future #gaming #superfast #240Hz #OLED #Asus #PG27AQDM #slow #motion
