QD OLED vs. Mini LED - $1,300+ HDR Monitor Showdown!

say you have fifteen hundred dollars for a new monitor and you've narrowed it down to two options the Alienware aw3423dw with its 34 inch 1440p 175 Hertz ultrawide QD OLED panel and the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 with its 32 inch 4K 240 hertz mini LED VA panel both of them are completely different monitors set out to tackle different markets yet I think the Alienware is the monitor to get spoiler alert it's not that the Samsung is bad I mean it has the world's first 4K 240Hz panel which is nuts in its own right but I think the mini LED backlight falls behind cutie OLED in most areas in my opinion Samsung should have just used the Cutie OLED Tech they created which is used in the Alienware even if it wasn't going to be capable of 240Hz at 4K anyway I'm going to compare the Alienware against the Samsung as well as sprinkle the LG 38 GN 950 a little here and but mainly I'll be focusing on the Alienware because it's now my daily driver which replaced the LG and it's also my favorite monitor ever until something better comes out when it comes to gaming the Alienware is very different from every other monitor I've used and reviewed notably it doesn't have an overdrive setting because it doesn't need it if you're not already familiar with how OLED panels work the pixels themselves emit light this is different than the traditional backlit monitor most of you are using which houses an array of LEDs behind the panel to give the pixels the brightness it needs for you to watch this video and porn I know what you do in your spare time the inherent benefits of OLED is that they have near CRT response times at any refresh rate which is to say that the response times are so low that no LCD can keep up so when you look at these UFO test images which are moving at 1920 pixels per second you can see that the Alienware has no trail behind the alien while the Samsung does now I have all the Samsung's overdrive settings in this this image just to show you that the higher you increase the overdrive setting the worse it gets that's not always the case with some monitors but it is a case here I'm showing you this because the Samsung does the best with its standard and extreme MBR setting which is their black frame insertion throughout the entire refresh range so I'm not even going to bother showing the faster and extreme overdrive setting anymore because it'll just be a waste of time now the aliens themselves are still blurry but that's because of the Persistence of the monitor which is basically the monitor's refresh rates they lower the refresh rate the higher the persistence which means the actual object will be more blurry you can learn more about persistence response times and so on by clicking on this video alright now let's bring the LG into the mix this is about as standard as it gets when it comes to LCD response times they're not bad but when you compare it to the Alienware it's not the best especially in the dark Grays where there's a lot of trailing now there's only so much a 1920 pixel per second alien can show you so here's some damn data showing you the initial response times as well as the overshoot for each monitor you can see that the ldm wear pretty much slaps anything else with its 0.9 milliseconds of response times and if you want to see the rest of the stuff and analyze it you can pause dropping the Alienware and the Samsung to a lower refresh rate shows that the Alienware is still on top in terms of response times when compared to other monitors now the LG is still at 160 Hertz for this image because I don't have any 120 hertz images so that's why the alien itself looks better because it has better persistence or lower persistence but if that doesn't make you happy let's go down to 60 hertz for all monitors at this point they're all tied but not actually if we look at the data you can see that the Alienware does the best having the same response times it did at 175 Hertz it doesn't matter what refresh rate you drop this thing to it performs the same compare that to the Samsung and LG and they just can't compete because the liquid crystals can only twist so fast with 60 refreshes per cycle the Alienware doesn't have to do any liquid Crystal twisting because it's just LED on and led off from one all the way up to 175 Hertz now do I actually notice any of what I've just talked about when it comes to actually gaming oh my God yes originally I didn't think that I would find Alienware being that much better because all of these monitors are already so top tier that they already deliver a great gaming experience but when it comes to really fast motion Esports Shooters like valorent flicking which ranges from 7000 to 10 000 pixels per second was more clear than my future if I flicked with the LG or Samsung oh you're gonna see the blur the Cutie OLED panel on this Alienware delivers a level of crispness I've never seen before and it blows my mind it still does even after I've been using it for over a month input lag is also better on the Alienware it had an average input lag of just 14 milliseconds at 175 Hertz which is surprisingly faster than the Samsung's 19mm seconds at 240 hertz you would expect the Samsung to do better with 65 more refreshes per second but apparently not and not only that it only gets worse from here at least for the Samsung at 120 hertz the Samsung had an average amp lag of 29 milliseconds whereas the Alienware was just 19. and at 60 hertz the Alienware had an average input lag twice as fast as the Samsung at 24 milliseconds versus 51 milliseconds the Samsung basically performs just as poor as a TV from 2017. so if you were thinking of buying the Samsung for 4K console gaming I would advise you not to do that and buy something else instead now the Alienware isn't perfect because the black equalizer sucks it basically does nothing and the color Vibrance doesn't exist so if these things matter to you then I guess don't get this Monitor and get the Samsung because the Samsung at least does well in those aspects but after seeing how good the response times are on the Alienware will that really be a deal breaker to anyone I hope not and you could also just use nvidia's color filters to get around the whole crappy black equalizer and non-existent color ribbons feature even though it might have a small performance hit with that said those features don't matter to me on this monitor which I know is weird to say for regular viewers because you guys know how much I love my black equalizer and color Vibrance but the HDR that this thing has makes me want to play games the way they were visually intended to look and I've never said that about any monitor before the Alienware has two HDR modes Visa certified hdr400 true black and HDR 1000 and you can only enable 10-bit color up to 144 Hertz bummer the Samsung advertises Quantum HDR 2000 which is not Vasa certified because HDR 2000 doesn't exist and it also has firmware 1003 and it can do 10-bit color all the way up to 240Hz at 4K and lastly the LG is Vasa 600 certified let's start off with the LG because it's the easiest one to talk about it's a bucks harder than a vacuum it has a total of six yes six local dimming zones which are also vertical so you're stuck with an experience that looks like this do I need to say more the Samsung has a mini LED backlight with a total of 1192 zones and while I don't think it's as good as the Alienware for reasons we'll get into later it's much better than pretty much all other LCDs out there with a nice density of mini LEDs this means that it can really localize brightness while leaving the dark areas dark because there won't be massive zones like the algae bleeding into areas it's not supposed to brighten it also gets very bright hitting a peak of around 1280 nits up to a 10 window 1080 nits with a 25 window and 650 notes with a 50 window that's really impressive the Alienware with its HDR 400 true black mode can maintain 450 nits all the way up to a 10 window and with HDR 1000 can only maintain 1050 nuts up to a two percent window 750 nits with a five percent window and 450 units on a 10 window which is considerably darker than the Samsung this is noticeable when you're on the desktop with a lot of whites and bright things but not as noticeable in games even when you're on a map that has a lot of sand and snow because it's not often you're going to see a lot of changes in scenery when gaming I mean it does happen but it's much less noticeable than if you were on desktop even though you know the screen went dimmer when playing games like it's just like yeah you really don't notice it as much now with all that said the Samsung easily beats the Alienware in HDR brightness with larger window patches this is one of the nice benefits of having a backlight you can make those LEDs much brighter and a bigger window patch than you can with an OLED pixel without having to worry about the monitor damaging itself however with that said I still prefer the hdr on the Alienware for every other reason number one the Alienware has a glossy finish whereas the Samsung is matte like pretty much everything else glossy screens aren't common for monitors but they are common for oleds and having a glossy screen on a monitor is way better than matte in my opinion for one the blacks are actually black rather than like a dark faded gray and despite what I just said about the Alienware being considerably darker in HDR brightness in equivalent window sizes when compared to the Samsung I think having a glossy finish is actually making those lower numbers feel brighter since you don't have a matte layer washing things out now the numbers I gave you are accurate but it just feels brighter than what the data is showing plus having a glossy finish gives a level of clarity I've never seen on a monitor before text is much crispier colors are more vibrant and beautiful and the gloss isn't actually that bad when it comes to reflection like you'd think it would be and yes technically it dolls reflect more things but rather than a light source scattering that light to the rest of the panel and fading even more of your screen into Oblivion this reflects light like a mirror making Reflections easier to ignore at least in certain situations but at least it doesn't wash the entire screen out number two on why I prefer alienware's HDR over the Samsung is the local dimming the Samsung has about 1200 zones whereas you can think of the Alienware having about 5 million zones since each pixel is self-immissive and you can basically count each pixel as its own Zone this will give the absolute best control over what parts need to be bright dark colorful Etc without having to worry about Halos like you would with a mini LED backlight and even though 1200 zones sounds like a lot and is a lot I personally don't think it's enough I mean just look at the Halos you get when you have a dark scene with some non-dark spots around it it looks absolutely horrible now yes what I'm showing you is another very specific example but it's perfectly valid in many real world examples with dark and bright spots in one scene this is the reason why I got rid of my 75-inch Vizio Quantum P-Series TV yes it was 4K had wide gamut support the colors were great and had local dimming but it only had 240 zones that's much worse than the Samsung's 1200 zones at 32 inches but the Samsung still looks like the Vizio despite the much higher dimming Zone density and its extremely ugly and distracting some people might not mind and prefer to have higher brightness and that's totally fine so if that's you then the Samsung is still a good option because it does get very bright in HDR and delivers a good experience I'm not saying it's a bad monitor I'm just saying that the Halos are obvious in certain situations and you will notice it gamut coverage on a Samsung was good but that's it it's just good the Alienware on the other hand was Sublime having 98 coverage of the DC ip3 color space and some 76 coverage of the HDR BT 2020 color space the Samsung had an out of the box color accuracy average Delta e of 3.88 which is great for typical consumer use but the Lem wear was once again much better having an average Delta e of under two making this ready for Color Work Straight Out of the Box this is also helped by the out of the box grayscale performance of the Alienware which is still at that average Delta e range of 2 and lower versus the Samsung which does all right having an average Delta e of 5.3 with a noticeable red tint an average color temperature that's further from 6 500 Kelvin than the Alienware and poor gamma curves extremely poor again this is totally fine for typical consumer use but it's not good at all for Color Work calibrating the monitors perfects all color and accuracies for the Alienware keeping every color under a Delta e of 2 except for the pure Reds which still does very well with a Delta e of around three the Samsung doesn't do anywhere near as good as the Alienware but it still does good having an average Delta e of 1.4 making this suitable for color work as long as you're not working on skin tones as the Samsung doesn't seem to have a good time displaying those colors both monitors come extremely close to each other in the calibrated grayscale test trading blows with the average Delta e color temp and Gamma both do phenomenally but overall the ldm wear is far better out of the box with its outstanding color accuracy and grayish color performance and the Alienware allows us to calibrate the colors more accurately and it has a much wider gamut displaying much more colors than the Samsung brightness on the Alienware was good but the Samsung was much brighter at 345 nits fortunately I just moved to a new house where the room my PC is in doesn't get much sunlight at all except from like four to five pm and even then it's still fine so I think 270 nits is sufficient enough but it might not be for you if you have a lot of sun coming in your room hitting the monitor directly and you don't have blinds or basically if you just don't have any kind of light control contrast on the Samsung was good at around 3001 but it's obviously better on the Alienware because OLED practically has no limits it can go as bright as 1000 hits and as low as zero nits so it's basically infinite even Kalman agrees a weird thing about the Samsung though was how much more contrasty it was when uncalibrated I suspect it has something to do with the extremely poor grayscale performance specifically the gamma where Samsung deliberately made overall performance poorer just to have higher contrast but I thought I should bring this up because I've never seen a monitor do this before also I was totally speculating on the whole deliberately making a gamma bad just for the record uniformity on the Samsung is great especially for a panel this large but the alienware's uniformity had by far the best results I've seen on any monitor I'm not sure if it's because of the panel Tech but I'll find out as I test more oleds in the future also what this test doesn't really show is backlight bleed which the Samsung did have I've had this issue with literally every curved Samsung VA panel I've ever used this is not present at all with the Alienware because well there's no backlights alright let's talk about some things that are specific to the Alienware because it has an OLED panel I know some people will dismiss it saying I don't want to pay thirteen hundred dollars for a monitor that'll get burning and I get why some might say that it wasn't long ago when OLED was notoriously bad for having permanent burn-in but even in 2019 artings proved that during their one year burn-in test oleds had become much more resilient and better at preventing burn-in they're still not perfect but they're better than they used to be on top of that these cutiele panels are supposed to be better at preventing Burnin than traditional OLED panels I have no clue if that's true or if it's all marketing fluff but we'll find out over time as the years go by the Alienware also has a pixel shift feature kind of like RuneScape to prevent botting except this is not to prevent botting it's to prevent burning so even though this has a 3440x1440 resolution technically it has more pixels than that on the edges of the display so it can shift within that empty space every few minutes or how over along the interval is so you have less of a chance of the same pixels being in the same spot all the time preventing burn-in even further and even if you did buy the Alienware and experienced burn-in Dell is so confident in this cutie OLED Tech that they have a three year warranty that protects you against Vernon meaning that if you get it they'll just swap it out for you so you can pretty much guarantee a burn in free experience for the next three years of ownership another thing we have to talk about is the sub pixel Arrangements it uses a non-standard triangle shaped Arrangement rather than the standard striped bass one and apparently because of this non-standard Arrangement fine text will have a slight color bleed around the edges this was one of my concerns when this monitor first came out because this was talked about a lot and I was afraid it would look ugly and I just wouldn't like the monitor despite its many advantages and I did notice something when I used the monitor for the first time but after adjusting the windows clear type text and using it for a few days I don't notice a thing does that mean that the bleeding doesn't exist no I'm just saying that if you're worried about the weird subpixel Arrangements you might not need to be you really just have to try it for yourself to know for sure all right let's talk about some smaller details then wrap this up both monitors have 100 by 100 Vasa mounting supports both have tilt height swivel and pivot adjustability both have legs that spread wider than your girlfriend both look great and have RGB both have a good amount of I O with the Samsung having HDMI 2.1 and the alien were not having that at all but it doesn't need it because DisplayPort and both have a wire routing solution one of them being done correctly and the other one being done the wrong way Samsung now I know it might sound like I'm riding the alien Wares and that's because I am it's just so good and it makes no sense why Samsung didn't just use the panel they created for their monitor they do have the Odyssey OLED G8 coming out but it's basically the same as this Alienware with the Samsung logo slapped on it what I want to see is a variety of screen sizes and resolution with QD OLED all we have so far is this Alienware form factor and large format displays like the Samsung and Sony 55-inch and 65 inch cutie OLED TVs really the only reason I can think of Samsung making the Neo G8 the way they did is so that they can say that they created the world's first 4K 240Hz monitor like yeah that worked with the G7 when they also created the world's first 14 140p 240 hertz monitor but the G8 HDR is nowhere near as good as the Alienware it's much harder to run games at 4K 240 hertz you pretty much can only do it with Esports titles the gamut isn't anywhere near as wide as you would expect and as far as I can tell from a few years of testing Samsung displays you will be lucky to find a unit without backlight bleed now I know the Alienware and the Samsung couldn't be any more different from each other but if you're spending one and a half thousand dollars on a monitor I don't think the G8 is a good option at all the Alienware is an ultra wide so games will fill your periphery more making you more immersed in games the OLED panel will never have you thinking look at these Halos the HDR is fantastic and it'll still blow your mind even if it's not as bright as the Samsung it's much easier to run games because of its lower resolution and we cannot forget about those amazing response times like I've never seen anything like it I mean yeah I've heard of it and seen it in reviews and other oleds but again seeing it for yourself is totally different honestly the only thing that'll make the Alienware more perfect at this point would be if it had a 240Hz refresh rate it would be like having your cake and eating it too we're almost there now if you're still insistent on buying the Samsung just buy their 55 inch s95b TV instead I've already seen it on sale for like 700 off meaning you can get one for not much more than the Neo G8 yes it's much larger but you'll probably be much happier than that than with the g8s and if you still want to buy the G8 then do whatever you want it's your money thanks for watching if you guys enjoyed the video leave a like if you disliked it or hate my guts leave a dislike you're helping the channel anyways by giving it interactions so go ahead subscribe because it's free follow me on my Twitter and join the community Discord to chat with people about gaming monitors and other PC stuff have a great day every day peace [Music] thank you

Channel: Bijan Jamshidi

Views: 84,415

Keywords: bijan jamshidi, qd-oled vs mini led, hardware unboxed, alienware aw3423dw, qd oled, mini led, samsung qd-oled, best oled tv, qd-oled review, samsung s95b review, alienware qd oled, alienware, best oled tv 2022

Id: UtAivRxLFAg

Length: 20min 43sec (1243 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 09 2022