To OLED or Not to OLED: Gaming Monitor Pros and Cons

as part of my ongoing efforts to help people who want to do PC gaming do PC gaming better I've been recommending some monitors this year and I have a set of monitors that cost two to three hundred dollars that I have been pitching to people for Budget gaming but I've also been talking a decent amount about OLED technology this year because it is sort of that fabled long time coming Tech that I have been pointing people towards for quite a few years now in fact if you go back to my actually the most popular video on my channel four rules for buying a 4K TV I said at that time that OLED is kind of the Holy Grail that people should aim towards even though it is fairly expensive but now it is 2023 OLED panels while still expensive are not nearly as expensive as they used to be and if you watched any coverage of CES 2023 you probably saw a lot of OLED panels both in TVs as well as in gaming monitors so today I'm going to be featuring one of those panels that's the LG Ultra gear 45gr95qe but because every time I bring up OLED panels I get some people who are like Yay OLED and other people who are like no OLED sucks you should never use them I thought today I would cover the pros and cons of OLED technology especially when it comes to gaming PCs excellent today's video is brought to you by the new thermaltake series 500 cases available in black and snow finishes and built for optimal cooling performance more than 60 percent of the panels are perforated with a stylish and functional hex pattern with dust filters too of course while the four included ct140 argb fans provide airflow and lighting there's a hinge to tempered glass side panel support for up to 420 millimeter radiators and available LCD upgrade kit and more so click the sponsor Link in the video description to check out the series 500 cases from thermaltake [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] after a fun unboxing and a bit of brief assembly just peeling off the plastic and getting the packaging sorted and everything and one thing that has sort of occurred to me on a few different occasions as I've handled curved displays like this one because this one has an 800 R curve actually pretty a significant curve is how do you attach like the stand and everything because for a lot of monitors the TVs I will just lay it flat to do that but with a curved panel you don't really want to do that it's going to put too much pressure on the frame so I just took advantage of this big styrofoam piece that it comes shipped with to lay it on top of and mount the frame and the stand for this one is actually not too difficult to snap into place as you can hopefully see here it's funny because even though I've seen this panel before and I've actually been working with several 45 inch panels like this made by LG display because LG display also makes the panel and the Corsair Xenia on Flex I'm still pretty impressed with it just getting it out and set up on the table right here I'm not doing a full review of this monitor today but when I visited LG at their CES booths I also ran into the tech chap and he actually did a very well done full review on this monitor so I'm going to link that in the video's description for anyone who wants a full detailed review of this specific monitor that said the key features are that it is a 45 inch panel measured diagonally and it's an ultra wide which is a 3440 by 1440 resolution that is a 21x9 aspect ratio and the curve on this is 800r which you might remember from my Corsair xenium Flex video is the maximum flexibility that the xenium flex can do this is pretty much the panel in the flexiest OR most curved position that they felt comfortable shipping it in but I think the features that make this an ideally suited gaming monitor are the fact that it's OLED which means it has really good contrast ratio 1.5 million to one is what LG lists on their actual specifications contrast ratio measurements can get pretty absurd because if you do the math right you can make it an infinite contrast ratio but that's part of the Native benefits of it being an OLED panel it doesn't have an actual backlight which means you can actually get true blacks when the pixels basically turn themselves off and then the final key features that make this a really desirable monitor for PC gaming are the response time 0.03 milliseconds gray to gray according to LG so that is Peak response time but that is another thing that OLED panels are really good at and then of course the refresh rate a 240 hertz refresh rate which is great for high-speed gaming and FPS gaming in particular and of course variable refresh rate technology built in it is vsync compatible and also freesync premium rated beyond that you have an actual adjustable stand with this model with tilt height and swivel adjustment support that is something that the queer xenium Flex didn't quite have because they build a lot of the technology into the stand with that model and then of course to turn the thing on I'm going to need to plug it in and for that I will need to get the accessories out which includes a power brick and AC power cable this little piece which snaps on the back to provide some cable management it does come with a remote control so you don't have to use the center mounted power slash jog dial button down there then you've got an HDMI cable a DisplayPort cable and a USB A to B cable so you can plug in the included USB hub as we begin this monitor set up we're noticing a few more details about it such as the fact that it has RGB lights on the back some accent lighting there which looks kind of cool granted you might not be able to see that at all once you actually get the monitor set up but I've also discovered that it is much easier to use the remote control to interact with this thing versus the button that's down here right there right there in front of the third LED that shines down a little bit on your desk to give you some ambient lighting as well let's get into the thick of the content for this video OLED pros and cons and one thing you should be keeping in mind as you're considering OLED panels is that they're OLED TVs like larger format typically that are meant to wall mount and be like a living room environment sort of thing and now there are increasingly more available OLED monitors as well like this one and the use case for a TV versus a monitor is slightly different for example if you go back to my four rules for buying a 4K TV video however long ago that was I said don't get a curved panel and that's still my recommendation for a TV that you're going to be mounting on a wall for a home theater situation a curve panel naturally makes there be one ideal point to be sitting at that gives you the best access to the panel that fills your peripheral vision and doesn't lead to you viewing the monitor from a funny angle and while that is incidentally my first pro for OLED panels is viewing angles they have the best viewing angles out of any panel technology that's available on the market you're pretty much going all the way until you're behind the panel you can't see it anymore you can still see a nice clear image with no discoloration or anything like that like you would get with mini LED or LCD technology and that's great for an OLED panel that you might have in a living room where you might have multiple people viewing and people viewing from off angles however it's also kind of a moot point for a panel like this where it's a gaming monitor where you're probably just gonna have a single person sitting at the ideal points betwixt the curve but at the same time that person wouldn't really be taking advantage of like the off angle viewing and the benefits of the really wide viewing angles that OLED panels have but that's also kind of why I made it the first thing because it's a little bit of a throwaway in this particular use case the second big Pro for Led pan channels is the fact that there is no backlight and this has multiple advantages even though these are pretty substantially sized monitors being 45 inch Ultra wides it's actually not too difficult to lift them up and move them around so it's nice to have that flexibility especially if you don't have big muscles to move a large monitor around but also the flexibility to flex the thing which is kind of like what Corsair did with their xenium Flex they made it to where you can Flex it or unflex it if you so desire however that monitor costs two thousand dollars this monitor is about 300 bucks less msrping for 1700 so it's probably up to the individual user to determine whether or not the ability to flex or unflex the monitor is worth that 300 premium the third big benefit for OLED panels is actually also related to it not having a backlight which means you can get basically true blacks because you don't have a backlight that might bleed through the panel to create light in areas where you don't want it every single Pixel or I should say sub pixel in an OLED panel individually lights itself so if that turns off then it's black and there's no light to shine through for me this is actually one of the biggest selling points for OLED panels that I've seen and I've gotten to the point where I can pretty much tell by looking whether I'm looking at an OLED panel or a non-o-led panel at least if there's a significant amount of black displayed on screen so for gaming and media playback like TVs and movies it's absolutely awesome to have that higher contrast ratio and speaking of contrast ratio the fact that there's no black light and it can display true blacks means that they can advertise pretty insane contrast ratio values like 1.5 million to one or whatever they call it for this one but also it means for HDR or high dynamic range support you're going to have much better compatibility with an OLED panel than you would otherwise item number four on our list of OLED Pros is response time and that is actually something that a lot of monitors struggle with but it is an area where OLED panels natively have an advantage across a range of OLED panels including LG you're going to have an average pixel response time of about 0.2 milliseconds which isn't quite as fast as again the advertised speeds on this panel but again keep in mind that LG will advertise the peak response time whereas measured response time are often a little bit slower than that comparatively even more recent qled panels that are designed for gaming have response times that are closer to about 3.5 milliseconds for PC Gamers and in particular fast-paced PC gaming going for a high refresh rate like the 240 hertz available on this one as well as a faster response time can literally impact your gaming performance and can make you just a slightly better gamer than you would have been otherwise it can't just completely turn you from a horrible gamer into a better gamer but it is a mechanical advantage that you can take advantage of if you have the money to invest in an OLED panel then I have one more fifth note here for OLED pros and that is that they emit less blue light natively so that is something that in particular for office use or long-term use it has been pretty well established the cutting down on the amount of blue light that hits your eyeballs is good for you long term and while there are different ways to do that like my lenses have a coating on them that blocks a little bit of blue light for example OLED panel is just naturally emitting less of that is a good thing but now let's switch over to talking about cons series reasons why you might not want to invest in an OLED panel or just a few things that you might want to be well aware of before you do because it's not all sunshine and daisies over here in OLED land the first one and the most popular in the comments section from any video where I've talked about OLED technology lately is the risk of burn-in and in particular when you're using an OLED panel as a computer monitor as opposed to say a TV although TVs have use cases where burning can happen as well you may potentially be at higher risk if you have say even something like this on display very high contrast with all white in one section versus black everywhere else if we just let this panel run with this image sitting on it for an extended period of time and then you switch to something else you might still see a ghost image of my thumb screw logo right there at the center of the screen and in worst case scenarios some OLED panels can get burned in permanently to where that image never goes away and this is actually something that can happen with a wide range of displays it's just something that OLED panels have been particularly susceptible to since they've started to become more broadly available on the mark Market but there is good news when it comes to OLED picture burning and that is that there are multiple ways to mitigate it or make sure that it never happens in the first place also just generally speaking the good folks over it ratings or artings.com have been doing a lot of testing with OLED panels they completed a long-term test with six panels in 2019 and their conclusion there was that we don't expect most people who watch varied content without static areas to experience burn-in issues with an OLED TV so that means with General mixed use and you're not in an environment where you're say using an OLED panel to display a menu at a restaurant that's going to be a fixed image at all times it's not going to be able to dim or otherwise chains itself they said it's basically a non-issue but if a six panel test is completed in 2019 isn't enough to convince you of that then consider that they're doing another test with 100 panels and that is a long-term test that's still ongoing so I'll post links to both of those down in the description as well as links to all of my references for this video if you're interested in finding out a little bit more my prediction is that with their 100 TV test and in particular the TVs that have launched in the past one to three years they're probably going to find even fewer issues and part of the reason for that is what's available on this OLED care panel here which actually has a dedicated button on the remote to access this lets you enable disable or modify the settings for multiple burn-in prevention Technologies for example the first one here is screen move they have four modes of this with varying intensity and basically what this does is slightly moves the entire screen by shifting it just one or two pixels and that might seem like something that would be distracting to you but I will say that we have had this enabled on our OLED TV at my house for some time and I've never noticed any shifting of the image or anything like that this is an example of pixel shifting which is also sometimes called pixel orbiting which basically says if you have like a pixel that would be white and a pixel it would be black but if you just move the picture just a little bit then that pixel will change color and the pixel not staying in the same fixed color for an extended period of time is the thing that prevents burn-in it needs to cycle to different colors and this this is one way to passively do that especially if again you're looking at a static image a lot of the time another technique that some panels use is called localized picture dimming or even full picture dimming here the monitor or TV has some intelligence built in that is actually monitoring what's on the monitor if it determines that the picture on the screen is the same picture for an extended period of time it'll be like you know what it doesn't seem like you're doing much right now we're going to go ahead and dim the image for a period of time or it might even have something like a screen saver some LG panels will show like some nice fancy pictures that are sort of saved on the TV itself do a screen saver mode before it shuts off entirely in fact just as I was recording this video a few moments ago it was like Hey the screen's about to turn off because you haven't done anything in a while so I did this and I just brought a window over really quick just so it would change the pixels recognize that there's something else on the screen and not go into screen saver mode if you still experience some image retention which is the soft version of burn-in like burn-in usually refers to like it's permanent it can't be fixed image retention can happen in some situations but then can be fixed and the pixels can be gradually nudged back into their normal mode and for that you have two built-in functions as well pixel cleaning which is a sequence that takes about one minute and then the bit more advanced image cleaning which is another sequence it takes about 10 minutes this will also help the panel do basically like wear leveling across the panel to make sure that all the pixels are being used about the same amount over the course of its lifetime our next con for OLED panels is one that's a little bit more nefarious because it hides just beneath the surface so to speak and it requires a little bit more explaining but it has to do with the clarity of the image on the screen in particular when it comes to displaying text because if you're using this for office work for example you're sitting fairly close to it if you have what's known as fringing or inconsistent edges or color shifting at the edge of text it can stand out quite a bit and be a less than ideal experience it is also something that's somewhat exacerbated by this panel's actual specs being 45 inches which is fairly large and 3440 by 1440 which is a good resolution solution but not nearly as pixel dense as some 4K displays so the pixels on this display naturally having a little bit more space between them as well as the sub pixel layout causing that text fringing is what has led some people to determine that it's not necessarily the monitor for them but what's actually going on beneath the surface as LCD and led panel technology has advanced over the years there have been various different types of panels and different types of panels have actually laid the pixels out differently sometimes they're in a grid with three pixels right next to each other but sometimes to put it generically they are arranged differently they are spread out in a grid or as is the case with this panel they might have just gone with a not as standard sub pixel layout which means that the r g and B sub pixels for each individual pixel are oriented a little bit differently and then this panel actually uses a wbgr layout that uses a white pixel as well which can lead to that fringing effect because the operating system which is Windows for most of my users doesn't exactly know how to handle that subpixel layout in order to properly displayed text Windows has a system called clear type and that could hopefully probably will be updated at some point so you can get native support for these other subpixel layouts within windows and that should help the problem so it might be something that gets fixed a little bit down the line for now there are some third-party options out there that are a little bit more on The Homebrew side of things that you can use to get clear type working properly with the subpixel layout in some of the more modern OLED panels that are out there but again at least for Windows users we're really looking to Microsoft to get the long-term fix in and update their software to be compatible with the latest OLED panel technology so those are the two biggest cons to OLED panels but I do have a couple more to toss in there as well I have often referred to OLED panels as being the Pinnacle of panel technology because of a lot of different things that I've already talked about today really good contrast ratio and all that however there is a fundamental spec that OLED panels are not the best at and that is brightness yes there is no backlight on an OLED Channel but there is also a limit to how bright each individual pixel can get that means that there are other Technologies out there many LED is the biggest one that comes to mind right away because it's new and kind of fancy they can get brighter and are therefore better suited for a bright environment so if you're looking for something that you know you're going to be using in an office with Windows where you can't shut them make the room dark then an OLED panel might not be the best solution for you however if you can get around that ambient brightness issue then with all of those other specs for a monitor's actual picture representation contrast ratio color depths typically OLED is going to win and then the last con for OLED panels is one that has been a constant ever since they were available at all in the retail Market they're Pretty stinking expensive oh look here's that screensaver mode popping up one more time I already mentioned the price of this one but I'll mention it again Seventeen hundred dollars which for some is totally doable but for others something like this is maybe a little bit more practical I don't have a lot of room for this but this is the gigabyte m34wq that monitor is smaller than this one at 34 inches instead of 45 inches of course but it's the same resolution at 34 40 by 1440 still has a high refresh rate at 144 Hertz still has variable refresh rate compatibility whether you're talking about AMD Radeon graphics cards or Nvidia g-sync support and it's even an IPS panel so it has better color depth than a lot of TN panels out there and that one you can currently buy for about 430 dollars so again that's 430 bucks for a very nice gaming monitor like that with a lot of the modern day stats and specs that you would look for if you're pairing it with a gaming PC versus 1700 bucks for this one or up to two thousand dollars for the Corsair zenium Flex which again is based on the same panel from LG display so what can I say to wrap up this video first of all for anyone who has commented on a different OLED video that I've done perhaps I directed you over here to give you my actual rundown of the pros and cons for this technology and I hope for any of you who are just getting into PC gaming or who are trying to wrap your head around all of the various specs and models that are available that this video has helped you in your decision making process I would like to say a big thank you to LG for sending this monitor over for me to check out and again a full review on it by Tech chap is linked down in the description as well as a direct link to this monitor if you've got the 1700 bucks or so to spend on buying one for yourself but that wraps it up for this video you guys thank you very much for watching and again lots of links down in the video's description so check that out you can also find a link down there to my store at pulsehardware.net where you can buy Shirts Mugs pint glasses and all manner of high quality merchandise to help support me and get some high quality merchandise at the same time if you enjoyed this video and you want to hit the thumbs up button on your way out that's always appreciated subscribing to my channel is also a good call too I've got lots more videos coming at you real soon thanks again for watching and we'll see you in the next one thank you

Channel: Paul's Hardware

Views: 151,961

Keywords: computer, PC, PC gaming, personal computer, computer hardware, paulshardware, OLED, OLED TVs, OLED gaming monitor, oled pc monitor, oled computer monitor, OLED pros, OLED cons, oled pros and cons, oled vs lcd, backlight, LG UltraGear 45GR95QE, 45GR95QE

Id: tbfZh6SCkzM

Length: 19min 59sec (1199 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023