Is it Time to Make the Switch? OLED vs IPS & VA

yeah I know seeing these more just side by side does totally make you want to buy an OLED monitor like honestly how can this super contrasty and crisp looking emerge not make you want to buy an all that in comparison the VA panel and especially the IPS panel look a bit miserable to be honest however I wouldn't make a video like this if just playing OLED what's the answer OLED is not the best panel tech for everyone and every use case not even if we pretend for a bit that OLED wasn't much more expensive than a CD because OLED mantras have quite a few drawbacks and there are very good reasons to buy a good old IPS or VA monitor instead and sometimes even one with ATN Panner so you might find yourself deciding between similar monitors with different panel types just like these three all of them are 27 inch 1440p monitors with a 240 hertz plus refresh rate the biggest difference between them really is the different panel technology which has has quite the impact on how good or bad these monitors are for certain things like gaming watching videos or productivity but there is also a huge difference in price this OLED monitor costs roughly as much as this VA and IPS monitor combined and all of these three monitors have essentially the same specs so all it is pretty expensive and probably will continue to be more expensive than SED for a long time that's definitely something to keep in mind when comparing these monitors side by side though this might be money well spent if you like watching videos or movies on your monitor like take a look at how much worse dark scenes look on the IPS monitor on the left the scene from Lost in Space or Netflix is supposed to be pretty dark with parts of the image basically being black as we can see on the OLED monitor on the IPS though the forest in the background just looks Gray slightly off axis the so-called IPS glow makes this even look worse even the black bar on top is now pretty much gone on the IPS whereas the outlet looks super crisp no matter the angle the VA monitor that we have here shows another typical defect of LCDs backlight bleed in the bottom right corner there is this bright spot which is caused by a not so uniform backlight a bit unfortunate but to some degree every IPS VA or TN panel monitor will have this issue you might get lucky and get a super uniform monitor that doesn't have much backlight bleed at all but chances are that you're gonna see at least very faint bright spots when the image is completely black and you're sitting in a fairly dark room this typically is less of an issue with VA panel monitors it's not like they're using more uniform backlights but as the black level of va is much better than on IPS or TN brighter spots typically just aren't that noticeable on VA monitors so if we ignore that bright spot that we got on this specific monitor the VA panel actually looks pretty good in the scene thanks to its pretty high contrast the monitor we're using here has a contrast ratio of over 3001 which is fairly representative of a good VA panel and about three times as high as what we're getting from a typical IPS so it's not surprising that the VA monitor can hold its ground against the OLED much better than the IPS can with normal SDR content Ava panel monitor like this one actually does a really good job dark areas aren't looking quite as crisp as on the outlet but even in this super dark scene from Lost in Space the overall image really doesn't look too bad next to the OLED HDR though is a whole different story challenging HDR content like this really shows the strengths of OLED the VA monitor has to crank up its backlight to show these super bright highlights which in return lifts up the Black Level the grayish somewhat cloudy background really doesn't make this footage look great OLED though is a selfless panel attack so it just turns off the picks pixels that are supposed to be black without affecting the pixels that are at full blast so for HDR play normal LCD monitors really don't stand a chance against OLED you'd at least need an LCD with a mini LED backlight to even compete with OLED and this area but mini LED versus OLED really is a comparison that deserves its own separate video play normal IPS or VA monitors are no competition for OLED when it comes to HDR for SDR though at least the VA monitor does a pretty good job sure dark scenes don't look quite as good on the VA monitor as on the OLED but at least better than on the IPS so why not just ditch IPS and get a VA panel monitor and save a bunch of money well the a panels typically are pretty slow which can ruin your gaming experience but also cause problems you can notice when browsing through the web for instance and when I'm referring to them as slow I specifically mean their pixel response times and not their display lag in fact when it comes to the actual display leg so the time it takes these monitors between receiving and showing an image there really isn't a difference between the panel types the IPS and VA monitor we're using for demonstration happen to be very low latency having slightly less processing lag than the OLED but you might as well find IPS and vas that are a fraction of a millisecond slower doesn't really matter though as a good monitor no matter the panel type has negligible processing lag that you're really not gonna notice over the reflex lag and the lag that's caused by the PC what does matter though are the pixel response times so the time it takes the pixels to change from one color to another and when it comes to these response times there are substantial differences between the different panel types LG claim that their new OLED monitor that we have here has a pixel response time of just 0.03 milliseconds that sounds pretty fast and relatively speaking that's at least a whole lot faster than the one millisecond response time number that this IPS and VA monitor are supposed have but how does this actually look like in real life well when the pixels are slow you're going to see that as a smeary trail behind everything that's moving across the screen like in this slow motion shot when there's Movement we see that the pixels don't switch from yellow to gray immediately but instead stay yellow for a few milliseconds which we're seeing as this faint yellow Trail that's left behind of course we don't want to see any smearing and therefore Fast Response times are good so is this all of this play actually as fast as the manufacturer claims well it's not 0.03 milliseconds fast when using a more realistic testing methodology but OLED is quick that's pretty clear when we compare it to Aura VA monitor that's 0.9 milliseconds for the OLED versus 6.6 milliseconds for the VA Monitor and that's a pretty substantial difference the IPS monitor manages to score closer to the OLED but 4.4 milliseconds are still quite a bit slower of course not every IPS or VA monitor will have these exact response time numbers in fact there are pretty wide differences between different monitors of the same panel type but I specifically selected these monitors so that they show what level of performance you can expect from a good IPS or VA monitor okay these numbers tell a pretty clear story on paper OLED is much faster than both IPS and VA but how much of an impact does this actually have on using these monitors well first up all of them are usable for gaming even the slowest panel type of the bunch the VA monitor does a decent job though you should only really consider the fastest VA monitors for gaming if you like playing FPS games between the IPS and OLED monitor the difference is more subtle even though the response time numbers would suggest that the OLED feels almost 5 times as fast as the IPS this really doesn't translate into the actual gaming experience I actually really struggle to pick up this difference when playing valorent and that's even with both monitors side by side and switching between them in a split second even when practicing fast flicks in the shooting range I don't feel like the IPS is holding me back in any way I'm training and aimlabs is one of the few scenarios in which the OLED actually feels slightly faster than the IPS this is a high contrast scene with fast movements and here can actually see that on the OLED the targets remain sharper and are better separated from the background when there's a lot of movement that's kinda hard to pick up from this footage but luckily there's blurbus as UFO test so I can actually show you what the difference looks like so when we compare these images the OLED looks indeed better than the IPS this is clearly not a night and day difference but the black lines and the body of the UFO are sharper on the OLED and there's less of a trail behind the UFO the V8 panel well it's already a pretty good result for a VA monitor but there's clearly more visible smear especially in the dark track which is super typical for the VA panel tank and you can even notice that when scrolling through the web like on dark mode websites thin text can disappear for a bit when you're scrolling too fast the OLED on the right of course doesn't have this issue as its pixels are much faster the Gaia star map demonstrates this even better you can really see how the VA monitor struggles to keep up once I stop moving the map the Stars suddenly pop up again and also far both IPS and VA kinda had a hard time competing with this OLED monitor however this big catch to this OLED panel tank OLED is amazing in a different room but as soon as you raise your window blinds things changed quite a bit today's OLED monitors simply don't get bright enough to overpower lots of ambient light expect a good LCD monitor to reach about 400 to 600 nits but OLED is typically kept at roughly 200 to 250 nits when large areas of the screen need to be bright and the monitors we have here demonstrate this really well living with an OLED monitor can be really frustrating if you don't have the means to block off ambient light and as if the low brightness wasn't enough OLED monitors that are equipped with the curved 34-inch quantum dot Outlet panel show another issue when ambient light is hitting the display these panels are lacking a polarizer which makes them reflect ambient light in an unusual way making the whole stream look grayish with a magenta tint this kind of ruins the black level and makes using these monitors during the day even more challenging so in case you see yourself using your monitor in a bright room you're probably not gonna be happy with the OLED monitors that are available today and there is another thing that might make you want to get a good old LCD monitor especially if you're reading a lot of text or like to do Graphics design see from up close a typical IPS VA or TN panel looks like this if you look closely you can see the red green and blue sub pixels that compose all colors that you see on your display most LCD monitors look like this and you can see that the IPS and VA monitor we're using for this video look fairly similar but this is what the 27 inch OLED monitor looks like from up close no this is not a black and white image but this monitor actually has a wide subpixels in addition to the red green and blue sub pixels it's a bit easier to see what's going on with this graphic you often hear people calling this layout W RGB or in the case of all W OLED and quantum dot OLED monitors have yet another different structure that looks a bit like this the big issue with these different pixel layouts is that your PC or whatever device you're using typically expects the display to be structured in this RGB layout that a typical LCD monitor is using and when that's not the case like with these OLED panels some things are going to look a bit weird like take a look at these folder icons for instance there's a pretty visible record on the left and a green board on the right you're gonna see this effect on lots of Graphics that have sharp edges text also is affected for the most part though black text on a white background looks pretty good with clear type an apps like word that support clear type text isn't really looking any worse than on a regular RGB layout display but watch what happens when I highlight the text the colored fringes are definitely not looking great and this is looking quite different on a regular RGB LCD display the VA panel on top really doesn't show any of this rendering quantum dot Outlets show yet another kind of fringing which looks different from w o lap panels but at this point I think it's pretty clear that both all the Technologies just aren't good for working with text or Graphics you should really consider getting a good old LCD if that's how you use your monitor both the weird pixel layout is pretty much a non-issue for things like watching movies or gaming you might be able to notice fringing with some UI elements or certain Crosshair colors as you can see some Crosshair colors show different colored borders on the W OLED panel but I don't think this is much of an issue for most Gamers so this doesn't change the fact that OLED is the superior panel tag when it comes to gaming or conjun consumption especially if you're using your monitor for both FPS gaming and watching movies OLED really is the only panel tag that's really great at both of these things with IPS or VA you have to compromise between one or the other however everything becomes a whole lot more difficult if you also like to use your monitor during the day or in a brightly lit room or just like to read a lot of text you kind of have to pick a poison and live with the drawbacks of either panel Tech in this case but remember that OLED also comes with the risk of burn-in artings did a huge investigation on this topic by adding a bunch of different OLED TVs running static content for an extended amount of time and yeah these results are quite alarming when you consider that monitors typically have to display a lot of static content at this point in time though we don't really know yet if these monitors will behave just like their TV equivalents but just the fact that burn in might be an issue will make you use your monitor quite differently like you probably want to Auto Hide Your taskbar and use pretty strict standby settings maybe even a dynamic wallpaper using an LCD monitor instead honestly just feels a lot more comfortable as you don't really have to worry about all of these things but yeah in return you're missing out on the amazing black level and contrast so as I said in the beginning there are good reasons to get a good old LCD monitor over these fancy new Outlets but in some aspects OLED is just much better than LCD which one you should go for really depends on how you're using your monitor in case you want to learn more about the OLED monitor that we've been looking at in this video I'd recommend watching my review that's linked on screen right now which goes into a lot more detail about this monitor thanks for watching with some nice video

Channel: techless

Views: 178,276

Keywords: oled, oled vs lcd, oled vs ips, oled vs va, woled vs qd oled, best monitor panel, lg oled

Id: yBylusZNZHY

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 31 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Bluefellow]

Why wouldn't he pick LCD monitors in the same price bracket?

[u/kasakka1]

I don't quite get how they end up with that OLED brightness issue. I use my current IPS LCD, which is capable of just shy of 400 nits max brightness, at similar levels I would use on an OLED - about 120 nits.

My room looks a whole lot like what their example shows, with light coming through curtains from my right side. Yet at 120 nits I have no trouble reading my display, even compared to my Macbook Pro 16" next to it which auto-adjusts itself to a much brighter level.