THE ULTIMATE DISPLAY TECHNOLOGY
BUT YOU’LL HAVE TO WAIT FOR IT
It’s the flat panel to rule them all, the ultimate display tech—we give you MicroLED. But it’s not coming to the PC anytime soon. It’s still years away, which is a pity because when it does hit the PC, it’s going to be awesome.
Like OLED, MicroLED is a self-emissive technology that offers true per-pixel lighting. So, each individual pixel can be turned off completely. That means essentially infinite contrast and true black tones. The difference is that MicroLED sidesteps organic compounds and so doesn’t suffer from burn-in. The latter is a major issue with OLED displays because of the differential degradation within the RGB subpixels.
In an OLED panel, the blue subpixels wear out faster than the red and green subpixels. That eventually causes permanent color distortion seen as burnin. It’s a problem that’s particularly tricky on the PC due to persistent on-screen elements such as the Windows taskbar, a prime candidate for burn-in.
Of course, the latest OLED panels have numerous mitigating strategies for reducing burn-in. Samsung, which supplies the panel for the new Alienware OLED gaming monitor, and Alienware’s parent company Dell are both confident it won’t be an issue to the extent that they provide a threeyear warranty covering any burn-in issues.
However, burnin isn’t MicroLED’s only advantage. It also supports peak brightness right across the entire panel, whereas OLED can only achieve that in small isolated patches of the screen. An OLED panel with a peak local brightness of, say, 1000 nits can typically only hit around 150 of fullscreen brightness.
The consequence is that even the latest OLED panels struggle with really bright scenes in HDR content, suffering from clipping and loss of detail. OLED is at its best in HDR terms when the screen is mostly dark with a few small and bright objects. MicroLED solves that problem and will be by far the best performing panel tech for HDR content.
So, why isn’t MicroLED coming to the PC soon? In a word, money. MicroLED remains very expensive, as in $80,000 for the cheapest currently available MicroLED TV.
There are numerous reasons why, but one of the most intractable involves the existing ‘pick and place’ manufacturing technique for MicroLED panels. It essentially means each MicroLED subpixel is being individually installed on the MicroLED backplane. On a 4K panel, that’s no fewer than 24 million MicroLEDs.
It’s one reason why existing MicroLED screens are currently made up of multiple panels. That makes broken pixels less of an issue if part of the panel can be replaced. That ‘pick and place’ method also puts a lower limit on pixel density. Consequently, the smallest 4K MicroLED screen produced so far is a Samsung 75-inch model.
Looking to the future, the great hope is that inkjet-like printing processes can be used to lay down MicroLED pixels, en masse. If that happens, costs will plummet dramatically.
But even taking the most optimistic view of MicroLED manufacturing tech, we’re at least five years away from moderately affordable TVs. MicroLED PC monitors with sufficient pixel density to replace LCD technology and cheap enough that normal people can afford them? They’re even further out than that. What a pity.