Is Mini LED really worse than OLED?

a portion of this video is sponsored by brilliant.org more about them later okay let's play a game of guess the panel teag one of these monitors has a mini LED backlight with 576 dimming zones and two of these monitors are oleds actually we have two different kinds of OLED here one is a w OLED and the other one is using a QD OLED panel and for good measure I've also thrown a VA panel with a conventional backlight into the mix so can you spot which one of these is which okay the VA panel with the conventional Backlot is probably pretty easy to spot it's simple B there's no question that the Black Level sticks out in a direct comparison but the others I have to say they all look pretty good I'd be surprised if you could actually tell all of them apart but the question really is if you were able to spot the mini LED among the two OLS I mean it's really common knowledge at this point that OLED is the Undisputed king of contrast and black leather and there's no denying that the per pixel dimming of OLED technically is superior to the much larger dimming zones of mini LED but I probably also don't have to tell you that oleds can burn in and degr over time and also have a few other drawbacks and quirks so if mini LED can manage to at least come close to OLED that's a big win so how much worse is mini LED in practice well footage like this local dimming test make mini LEDs seem kind of bad to be honest at least in the direct comparison to OLED you can clearly see a bright Halo surrounding the white bar on the mini LED panel reason behind that is the size of the local dimming zones we only got 576 of them which looks something a bit like this so if we want to display this white bar there are probably about 20 zones or so that need to be turned on to light up this shape so the area that's going to be lit is much larger than the actual object and we can see this as a light leak surrounding the pixels that we actually want to be lit of course this is still much better than turning on the whole back light yeah it's really no comparison many LED definitely is a great improvement over having a normal backlight but with this monitor we still have 6,400 pixels that are sharing a single dimming zone so small shapes that only cover just a few pixels and are supposed to be bright at the same time are going to be a huge problem these city lights for example an oler panel really has no issues is playing super bright light spots against a completely black background whereas on the mini LED the lights look a bit dull and that's not because it lacks brightness this mini LED monitor actually can get extremely bright in fact much brighter than both OLED monitors like side by side you can really see how much brighter the mini LED monitor on the left really is the monitor on the right is using a QD OLED panel which typically have a slightly higher fulls screen brightness than the W OLED counterparts but it's still nowhere close to the brightness you can get from mini LED and that's not only the case for full screen brightness but it's true for smaller areas as well here we have the HDR brightness of the OLED monitors in blue and light blue and the mini LED in Orange and the mini LED is consistently brighter than both oleds only towards super small window sizes the oleds start to catch up so high APL scenes like this one look much more impressive on the mini LED monitor thanks to its higher brightness kind of hard to convey over camera but this Monro can get so bright that it actually makes you squint your eyes which makes you wonder why do these City Lights then look so dark well the mini LED backlight can get extremely bright but it has to decide turning up the brightness of the backlight zones would make the city lights shine bright but a single zone is so much larger than each of these lights so it would also light up the blacked areas surrounding those lights and we get tons of blooming as a consequence so yeah it's a balancing act and in this case the monitor decides to dim Down the Lights quite a bit to prevent excessive blooming sacrificing brightness in the process small light dots really are the hardest thing for mini LED but with larger shapes this Balancing Act gets a whole lot easier 576 zones can actually mimic this footage pretty well like you can already kind of guess what's going on just by looking at these squares increasing the Zone count would of course improve things a lot and a few thousand zones already resemble the original footage pretty well at some point we're probably going to get mini LEDs with Zone cons like this or even higher that approach per pixel dimming but for now this monitor with its 576 zones on a 27in display is a good representation of what you can get in today's market and with more realistic video material the image actually looks pretty good even next to OLED and let's not forget that video material isn't always perfect the media we consume usually is compressed pretty heavily which is something you can learn more about in brilliant's course about video compression yes this is an adre for brilliant.org how video compression works is part of a course that explains and shows the inner workings of everyday technology have you ever wondered why many YouTube videos show these blocky compression artifacts BR courses use interactive Graphics that make complex topics like video compression algorithms easy to understand or did you ever wonder how Wireless communication like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth actually work with brilliant you can learn all these things in fun and interactive way no matter if you want to learn a new skill or just curious about how things work the courses range from basic introductions to deeper explanations of complex topics and they're adding new courses every month covering topics like math data science and computer science all in an interactive and Visually pleasing way to try everything Brin has to offer free for a full 30 days visit band.org teas or click the link in the video description the first 200 of you will get 20% of brilliant's annual premium subscription now back to the video okay this is a bit of a unique situation like how many people are going to have an OLED display right next to their mini LED displaying exactly the same content and with an OLED as a reference it's pretty easy to cross check if any blooming your spot is actually supposed to be in the footage or caused by the mini LED panel otherwise that's not so easy to tell it's really super common to have some amount of blooming bed into video footage either caused by the camera lens filters or even by our own eyes yes our own eyes are actually scattering light too so when looking at the mini LED monitor and isolation it's sometimes pretty hard to tell if the blooming is supposed to be there or not unless of course you're looking at synthetic tests that are supposed to have no blooming at all but yeah when enjoying a good movie the additional blooming of the mini LED Tech often is messed by other effects and really is something you only really going to notice in very few scenes however this is very different on the desktop even those simple things like moving the mous cursor over a dark mode website starts to feel like a local dimming stress test and it's not just the mouse cism typical everyday desktop tests are just full of high contrast shapes like text documents buttons or icons or even just dark mode text it's really not a great experience as you're going to see a lot of blooming all around and it's super obvious that this is not supposed to be there olet however does a fantastic job with all these artif official high contrast shapes as you would expect so you might think that oler would be perfect for productivity tasks but unfortunately that's not the case partially that's because of Burnin olet monitors are still quite new to the market so it's hard to say how much of an issue bur in actually is for mixed usage but it's pretty safe to say that staring like 8 hours a day at a white Word document isn't something you should be doing on an OLED Monitor and it kind of feels like beating a dead horse at this point but text really doesn't look great on OLED panels anyway I'm just going to link my in-depth comparison of w OLED and QD OLED in the video description in case you want to know more about the color fringing issues that the two different kinds of oder panels have many LED displays generally don't have this issues as they're essentially just plain normal LCD panels mostly IPS or VA with a fancy mini LED backlight attached to it so for regular desktop test you're just going to turn the local dimming off making this basically a plain normal LED LCD mod monitor with all its pros and cons and the fact that many LED monitors still rely on classic LCD panels also means that you got to live with slow response times slow in comparison to OLED that is here we have the response time charts of two mini LED monitors that are using a very similar mini LED backlight if not actually the same but the panels they're using are quite different and so are their response times characteristics but average response times in the 4 to 6 milliseconds ballpark are about the best you can expect from a good mini LED monitor all it however is on a whole another level less than 1 millisecond on average which is crazy fast with a super strict testing methodology and that's pretty consistent no matter if the monitor is using a w o panel like the one on the left or a QD oer panel like the one on the right so there's no question that OLED is the superior tech for gaming a mini LED really can be a hit or miss depending on the panel that's being used in combination with the mini LED backlight and also depending on the overdrive tuning now some people are afraid that the mini LED backl light might also add additional lag like if you think about it it kind of makes sense that the monitor has to decide which zones to light up by how much for each frame it has the display and this might take a bit of additional processing time in reality though these decisions can be made almost instantaneously so the mini LED monitor we've been looking at in this video only takes an additional 0.2 milliseconds of processing when local dimming and HDR are turned on funnily enough the two old monitor have even slightly more processing leg they're still slightly faster overall thanks to their higher refresh rate and really all three monitors are super responsive but anyway bottom line is that the mini LED Tech doesn't automatically come with a perceivable lag penalty some models might but this monitor proves that it doesn't have to be the case now to Circle back to the original question how much worse is mini LED in practice then all things considered well if you expect mini LED to look just as good as OLED and each and every scenario you're going to be disappointed OLED still is The Benchmark for contrast and response times and that's probably not going to change anytime soon no matter what you throw at it there's basically no ghosting no blooming and just perfect blacks and contrast mini LED however is just less consistent and doesn't work equally well for every piece of content with some footage you will definitely notice the shortcomings of the mini LED Tech especially on the desktop locco dimming really doesn't work well yet but when we're talking about typical HDR movies or story based games mini LED can actually get you surprisingly close to the olded experience and for high brightness content I'd even prefer the image on the mini LED monitor it's also the slightly more affordable tag likely to be more durable and it's a bit more versatile so even though OLED technically is superior mini LED definitely has its place I mean OLED also isn't perfect so for people who also want to use the monitor during the day for productivity tasks and basically everything that involves a lot of text mini LED currently is the better option as you can just turn the local diming off on the desktop so yeah I hope one day we'll get an actual no compromises display technology no idea if that's going to be new oler panels that are much brighter burning resistant with no color fringing or super fast mini LED displays with pixel size dimming zones or maybe micro LED is ready until then I don't know what do you think anyway thanks for watching pleas some next video

Channel: techless

Views: 154,331

Keywords: mini-led, QD-OLED, Samsung Odyssey OLED G9, LG 27GR95QE, KTC M27T20, WOLED, Mini LED vs OLED

Id: ZZWvCbOXroc

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2023