4K WOLED vs 4K QD-OLED - Everything You Need to Know

welcome back to monitors unboxed are you thinking of jumping into the OLED gaming ecosystem with a brand new 32in 4k 240Hz model but you're not sure whether to get one with a QD OLED or wed panel today's video is going to provide an in-depth comparison between the two main variants to show you exactly which panel is better in which scenarios including some side by-side visuals that we haven't shown in reviews before in 2024 two new and directly competing olded panels hit the market from Samsung display and LG display offering base specifications of a 32in 16x9 panel format maximum 3840x2160 resolution and 240 HZ refresh rate the Samsung QD OLED panel has been used in monitors such as the Asus PG 32 ucdm MSI 321 urx and Dell aw 3225 qf while the lgw OLED panel has been used in the LG 32gs 95 U many more monitors using both panels are set to to be released throughout 2024 as well so what even is QD OED and wed well they are both subvariants of OLED displays or organic light emitting diode displays this refers to how the display panel produces light OLED panels directly emit light from a layer of organic diodes millions of diodes per panel all OLED panels whether we're talking cued or W OLED function in this way and provides several key benefits as oleds directly emit light from each panel every pixel is able to control its light output individually giving us per pixel local dimming a key feature to brilliant HDR presentation oleds are also able to fully switch off individual pixels to display black leading to deep zero level blacks and Rich Shadows if you haven't used an OLED monitor before the most obvious comparison is to an LCD Liquid Crystal displays feature a backlight that emits light which then passes through a layer of crystals that twist to control color and brightness output as LCD backlights are either uniform or split into zones LCDs do not have per pixel control so you don't get per pixel local dimming or the ability to switch off individual pixels the crystal transition process in an LCD is also typically slower than an OLED modifying the light output of a given pixel in short the usual features buyers desire from an OLED are its perel control and its transition speed features you get with both W OLED and QD OED where the OLED subvariants differ is in their panel composition and sub pixel structure W OLED uses an OLED layer that emits white light which then passes through color filters to display red green and blue in addition there's a fourth subpixel with no filter passing through the white light of the OLED layer this white OLED design with its fourth white subpixel gives W OLED its name it means white OLED Q OLED operates differently the OLED layer in a c lead emits Blue Light which passes through a quantum dot layer modifying the light wavelength to red and green for the red and green sub pixels the blue subpixel passes through the blue OLED light qdo Leeds therefore only have three subpixels and these are arranged in a triangle configuration with green on top and red and blue on the bottom the QD in QD OLED refers to the quantum do layer that's key to its design while the underlying technology is still OLED the way W OLED and QD OLED panels operate is significantly different which leads to many differences in performance and other display characteristics this is especially the case with the latest 32-in 4K panels designed for monitor use in terms of speed and Motion Performance there is little difference between woled and QD OED response times across all the oleds I've tested so far transition speeds are roughly the same they're lightning fast for both wed and QD OLED in the 0.3 millisecond range so when both panel Technologies a run at the same refresh rate in this case 240 HZ the maximum you can achieve on both at 4K the resulting Motion Performance is essentially identical unlike with LCD subvariants such as TN VA and IPS you don't have to worry about speed when deciding between W OLED and QD OLED however with this generation of panels there is one key difference LG display have created a technology they're calling dual mode which allows their W olded panels to operate at a lower 192 20 x 1080 resolution with a higher 480 HZ refresh rate switching between modes at least on the LG 32gs 95 U is fast and easy through a button included on the bottom edge of the display this gives 4K wed monitors a clear advantage in motion Clarity for Competitive Gaming because the refresh rate can be double that of C OLED when looking at blur Busters UFO test results you can clearly see the difference in Clarity between a 240 HZ and 480 HZ OLED the 480 HZ image is simply much clearer and elements such as fast moving text are easier to pass in motion with a clearer less blurry image in motion at 480 HZ competitive Gamers have an advantage spotting enemies in fast-pace battle scenarios of course to achieve 480 HZ on a w olded you have to sacrifice resolution and a 1080p image on this monitor doesn't look amazing in terms of text Clarity or sharpness especially compared to the native 4K mode but it's purely an optional mode that has no impact on the 4K 2 40 HZ mode so in the best cases a 4K W olded panel can be faster in competitive scenarios if you're willing to drop the resolution and in the worst cases a 4K wed will be equal to 4K QD OED in Clarity when both are set to 4K 240 HZ the higher refresh rate in the Dual mode configuration also gives W olded the edge in input latency while all 4K oads that I've tested have had excellent sub 1 millisecond processing delays in their SDR and HDR modes the higher 480 HZ modee has less refresh lag and lower overall latency because the refresh rate is twice that of the 240 HZ mode so when comparing W OLED and QD OLED input lag they're both roughly the same at 4K 240 HZ but W OLED panels are capable of even lower lag when set to the 480 HZ mode if you are firmly a single player oriented gamer that will mostly use the 4K mode there's little difference between the OLED Technologies for motion if you're a competitive gamer the 480 HZ mode provided with W OLED is clearer and provides lower latency giving it a notable Advantage brightness is always a significant talking point when it comes to OLED as this is a known weakness compared to LCDs there are some differences between 4K W OLED and 4K QD OLED panel brightness but it might not be as significant as you think now panel brightness isn't always consistent across implementations especially with wed we saw last year with 1440p monitors that some manufacturers like Asus were able to provide higher brightness than others using the same panel QD oleds tend to be more consistent in brightness capabilities across models though brightness accuracy can vary so what I'm about to talk about is based on testing just a handful of the 4K OLED models that will be available this year SDR brightness is basically the same between the W OLED and QD OLED models that I've tested so far both panel variants offer 250 nits in the SDR configuration with uniform brightness modes available or enabled by default still not especially bright but no Advantage either way in HDR brightness both panel types appear capable of a similar level of Peak Performance Based on testing the 32gs 95 uee 2% and 10% window brightness can get slightly higher on the W old Leed model while 5% is higher on the qdl Ed models this is based on synthetic testing using standard patterns for brightness accuracy this is something that will vary depending on the model that you get so far the qdl lead models I've been testing have achieved a greater eotf tracking accuracy than the W OLED model from LG but across the last few years testing oleds this is more related to how the specific product is tuned rather than the panel being offered so it pays to look at reviews and see which specific models are the best in terms of accuracy it's possible that other W olded monitors coming in the next few months will offer similar accuracy for HDR eotf it's also possible that brightness accuracy is affecting real world results while test patterns show brightness trading blows between wed and QD OLED if not the wed being slightly brighter for the smallest peaks in real scenes the QD OLED monitors I've tested have typically been brighter for example in our low APL video test the MSI 321 urx hits 897 nits whereas the LG 32gs 95 u in its brightest mode achieves just 63 nits there's a less substantial difference in midl scenes but still an advantage to cuol however this is something that should be assessed per model as even some qds don't perform the same as you can see with the differing results between the Asus MSI and Dell models what won't change between models is that QD OED has significantly higher color brightness than wed the brightness results you've been seeing so far have related to White brightness which on W Old Leeds is enhanced thanks to its White sub pixel when displaying bright highly saturated colors the White sub pixel has no effect leading to worse results on a w OLED panel typically what I've seen is that color brightness on a QD OLED is more than twice as high as on a w OLED for the primary colors red brightness improves from 105 to 241 nits going from W OLED to QD OLED green improves from 296 to 686 nits and blue improves from 34 to 69 nits you'll also see large gains for the mixed colors like cyan yellow and magenta this means that when content requests a bright and highly saturated element like a neon sign for example the qdl Leed screen will get much brighter this leads to a significant Advantage for QD OED in color volume based on low APL testing that has both panels producing their brightest highlights QED achieves around 73% Rec 2020 color volume compared to just 34% for wed the advantage clearly goes to qdo for displaying the largest amount of the HDR color and brightness range there's a less significant difference in color space coverage though woled typically sits around 72 to 73% W 2020 color space coverage whereas QD OED is in the 80% range so while qdo Leeds can display a larger range of colors than wed when brightness isn't factored in both panel types do offer a wide color gamut that's suitable for HDR text Clarity is a big talking point with 4K QD OED and 4K wed panels both of these new higher density panels offer better text Clarity than previous iterations and in my opinion for typical usage the text quality of either is decent enough you won't see text quality that's quite as good as an LCD of the same size and resolution but for most applications like web browsing or writing documents it's pretty good and I've been using a 4K QD for productivity for over 6 weeks now with no real issues with the 32-in 4K panels QD and wed do render text differently this is due to a different subpixel structure between the two w OLED uses RG WB in a stripe configuration whereas cded uses triangle RGB with the green sub pixel above the red and blue modern operating systems use subpixel text rendering techniques to improve text quality and these techniques are designed around traditional RGB stripe sub pixel layouts you see in LCD panels any deviation away from RGB stripe leads to weaker text quality and both QD OED and wed offer different layouts to RGB stripe my opinion is that at 140 PPI the artifacts with 4K QD text rendering are difficult to spot but there are different artifacts with qdo Leed and wed QD OED typically sees a bit of pink green fringing at the bottom and top of text respectively W OLED typically sees some shadowing along the fine left or right edges of text based on my typical usage of these panels using 125% scaling in Windows I find the shadowing on woled more noticeable than the ing on QED but after examining a range of different configurations this can differ depending on everything from Tex size and font to text color and background some of these things can be hard to visually show on camera as the closer you get to the screen with greater magnification the more likely the footage is to show individual pixels which is not really how you view this sort of pixel density at a normal viewing distance but I'll try my best to explain it basically the smaller the font size is the better qdl Le tends to look when viewing this small font size The Edge definition around especially some of the lowercase letters like b f and P is better on cued not all letters look better but in general I think CUO Le is ahead with that said the smaller the font the more likely fringing will appear though it's much more visible in this footage than in real life with larger font sizes it's much more of an even match for example CIO Leed with this font handles letters like capital E and lowercase n better but do W OLED is superior for capital T and lowercase j the differences are also less pronounced for white text on a black background as well as various colors of text like red or green generally having used both panels side by side I prefer the way that QD OED renders text in Windows however I don't think it's a significant issue and buyers should largely be happy with the text quality offered by these oleds it's significantly better than previous OLED panels if you absolutely must have the best text quality then IPS LCD will be the best choice for you but in 2024 the density and sub pixel structure of these olds is good enough for typical use the screen coding used for QD OLED and W OLED is also substantially different QD OLED uses a glossy coding for the monitors released so far whereas W OLED uses a matte coding and LG displays choice to go with matte for their panels has been reasonably controversial however in my experience whether glossy or matte is better can be highly subjective and it could depend on how you use your monitor W oleds use a screen coating and panel composition that is more effective in brighter ambient environments the use of various filters results in less reflection of ambient light preserving the Deep blacks of OLED in more conditions in brighter environments especially with Lighting in front of the display this type of matte W OLED will appear to have deeper blacks than a glossy cued in a side by-side comparison you can clearly see the black blacker appearance of wed when showing black compared to the red gray of C OED which is reflecting more ambient light the matte finish also helps wed reduce defined mirror Reflections compared to QD OED in bright environments it's possible to clearly see some objects reflected in a glossy cued display and this is especially problematic if there's bright objects like lights or Windows opposite your monitor on a wed these elements will be diffused and less distracting although any light is generally still reflected to some degree the glossy finish on C olid is also one of the better Coatings for minimizing mirror Reflections even if they are still present on the other hand there are some setups where QD OLED will be preferable optimizing light placement to avoid light sources shining on the display will greatly reduce ambient light reflectivity and it is possible in some cases to get qdo Le reflecting less light in general making use of the glossy finishes ability to prevent diffusing light this will be a case-by casee basis though and could take some work to optimize but generally if you can get light sources largely behind the screen QD OED will end up looking better than the matte W olded coating as there is no coating grain this gives CED the appearance of Greater Clarity and a more crisp presentation with no noticeable light diffusion it also enhances the apparent contrast in some situations providing more pop to vibrant high contrast scenes the W OLED coating grain is moderate in nature and can be noticeable in some situations though I personally don't find it annoying in a dark environment such as Gaming With the Lights Off there's really not much of a difference between QD OLED and woled except for coding grain both panel types will produce the same Rich zero level blacks with no ambient light in the room the matte finish does not impact blacks in this sort of environment and neither does the qdl Leed panels poor handling of ambient light Reflections to summarize the difference in coating though generally you'll want a matte coating if you're mostly going to use the monitor in a brighter environment and a glossy coating when using it mostly in a darker or light optimized environment both QED and W OED variants offer similar viewing angles excellent in both cases with little falloff to colors or brightness when viewing at off angles both panel types have excellent edgo Edge uniformity due to their High viewing angles so at a typical viewing position there is no obvious issues viewing the corners of the screen one thing to note though is if you are interested in a curved 4K OLED monitor currently that is only offered with cuol technology the Dell Alienware aw 3225 qf uses one of Samsung displays curved offerings whereas LG display are only producing flat W oleds with this format at the moment while generally uniformity is quite good with both wed and QD OED for dark gray Shades wed can suffer from artifact issues we label the dirty screen effect this is difficult to capture on camera but basically when viewing large uniform sections of dark gray like you get in some applications QD OLED will show these sections clean with great uniformity whereas wed has a bit of a dirty speckling that makes these sections less uniform it's a minor annoyance that may affect some applications but as large gray sections like this are uncommon in video content or gaming it won't affect many of the typical olded use cases power consumption also differs between QD OED and wed though it depends on the content you're viewing when content is predominantly white w OLED is typically more efficient thanks to the use of a white sub pixel using around 35 to 40% less power than QD OED for Pure fullcreen White however in other scenes where the White sub pixel has little to no Advantage like viewing the steam Store homepage the situation is reversed and now QD OED is more efficient in this example I saw 47 Watts on the wed and 32 watts on the QED other aspects to Performance will largely come down to individual models and units color calibr is one example where this will differ depending on the brand as will features like KVM switches color space emulation modes Port selection and burin warranties however based on what we've seen announced so far it seems that if you want Doby Vision support that will only be provided through QD OLED variants overall when choosing a new 32-in 4k OLED Monitor and deciding whether to go QD OED or W OLED there's more to consider than might first appear the two panels on the market right now are based on the same sort of underlying technology ology but the implementation performance and features are quite different the main similarities relate to the fundamental aspects of OLED response times and Motion Performance are the same at the same refresh rate and both variants offer deep zero level blacks and per pixel local dimming leading to excellent HDR presentations we're also faced with similar SDR brightness the same excellent viewing angles and a similar risk of burnning we just don't have the evidence yet to say which OLED technology is more resilient there are also going to be areas which will come down to the individual models offered by the various monitor manufacturers calibration in both the SDR and HDR modes brightness accuracy Port selection additional processing features burin warranties and so on are all controlled by the OEM and will differ between models even if they use the same panel so as always check reviews for those things when it comes to the differences though there are clear strengths to each OLED variant the 4K W OLED panels have the edge in motion Clarity with their dual mode functionality that allows it to run at 1080p 480 HZ lowering input lag and increasing Clarity for competitive Gamers while there's no real difference at 4K 240 HZ the ability to run at that higher refresh will be highly attractive to those that love to play fast-paced titles QD OLED has the advantage in color quality this OLED type has a wider color gamut and much higher color volume as color brightness is significantly higher compared to W OLED while W OLED theoretically can produce higher Peak white brightness in practice so far we've seen qdl leads get brighter in most HDR situations although this could vary between units I also noticed better uniformity on the qdl lead panels with no dirty screen effect and so far qdl leads are the only type to support Dolby Vision though it seems more of a Scala limitation than wed panel limitation as to why the Weds announced so far haven't supported Dolby Vision as obviously there are W OLED TVs that do support Dolby Vision there are some areas that will come down to personal preference as well QD OED panels are mostly glossy while all 32in 4K wed panels are matte each coating has its strengths and weaknesses and some people have very strong preferences as to which is better I think cdol Leed is better in Darker environments and W OLED better in brighter environments there are also differences in text Clarity where I have QD OLED slightly ahead based on what I've tested though both panels offer decent enough text quality for everyday productivity use I know this can be a bit of a copout at times but when it comes to 4K W OLED versus 4K QD OLED I don't think there's an obvious winner and I would recommend each panel to a different sort of buyer if you love competitive multiplayer gaming I think 4K W OLED with its dual mode functionality is the Clear Choice but for single player HDR gaming I think the higher brightness and Superior Color volume of qol Leed is more attractive in terms of actually choosing a monitor to buy I suspect a lot of it will come down to the actual monitors on offer as well not just the panel being used I personally think the LG 32gs 95 U using the W olded panel is too expensive right now at $1400 us it's lacking a few of the features compared to QD allet Alternatives and it could do with better calibration you'll see more about that in my review but there are more W olds coming later this year from Brands such as Asus which may be more competitive in some of these areas what I'm happy to see in general though is competition and plenty of great options having two panel variants means more options for buyers more competition to drive prices down and hopefully it will incentivize further development and Innovation among olded gaming panels so anyway that's for this comparison between 4K QD OLED and 4K W OLED hopefully a few more comparison shots some nice useful information if you're tossing up between the two main variants that are available at the moment if you appreciate all the testing that we do here on monitor's unbox please do go watch the reviews that cover in-depth some of the monitors that we've been talking about the LG Asus Dell and MSI variant we've got full coverage of all of those up on the channel right now and as we get more variants coming in we'll be testing those as well so subscribe to the channel for more also if you want to support us directly we've got our patreon and float plan accounts links are in the description below down there you'll find access to things like our Discord Community which is a great place to sign up and talk about monitors chat about recommendations other sorts of things obviously all of our PC Hardware stuff is in there as well BTS videos monthly live streams plenty of good stuff so thanks for watching I'll catch you in the next one [Music] [Music]

Channel: Monitors Unboxed

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Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2024