WHEREFORE ART THOU, OLED?
It feels like OLED has been the next big thing in monitor tech for about a decade. It’s been one of those technologies that seems to always be just around the corner, but somehow never arrives.
OLED, or Organic Light Emitting Diode, tech has actually been successful on the small scale of smartphone displays for several years. Scaling the technology reliably and affordably for big displays has proven more difficult. However, the major brands in the HDTV market went big on OLED at CES earlier this year. What’s more, the first laptops with full OLED displays have now gone on sale, including the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga and the latest Alienware 13.
Strictly speaking, the first OLED PC monitors have also arrived. The Dell UP3017Q delivers an OLED panel in a 30-inch 4K form factor. Problem is, it’s a $5,000 screen. OLED, then, isn’t exactly mainstream. But it will be worth the wait when it does become more affordable. That’s because, when you get right down to it, LCD is a fundamentally borked technology on which to base a large, full- color display. When you sit in front of the latest 4K HDR LCD TV, that’s easy to forget. The world’s display engineers have done an amazing job of compensating for the obvious flaws in LCD technology. But the advantage OLED has, by virtue of each pixel being its own light source in terms of contrast, viewing, and response, is simply too much. Already, OLED beats LCD hands down in many areas, and it’s still a nascent technology. A decade from now, OLED displays will be making anything with an LCD panel look utterly ancient.