2020 VISION
What’s hot and what’s not in screen tech in 2020? Jeremy Laird takes a deep dive into the PC monitor market.
Screens today offer more innovation, wider choice, and better value than ever. But, by some metrics, PC displays are disappointing. By other measures, though, marketing madness is starting to take hold.
How so? On the one hand, you can now choose from a huge array of form factors, sizes, and aspect ratios, many of which are more affordable than ever. Innovations such as high refresh rates and adaptive sync have entered the mainstream. Support for HDR or high dynamic range content is becoming widespread, too. Connectivity solutions such as USB Type-C make it simpler than ever to hook up displays to PCs of all kinds. And panel tech is improving, with better contrast, lower response times, and technologies such as local dimming contributing to dramatic improvements in image quality.
On the other hand, some elements of screen tech refuse to move forward. The most obvious involves pixel density, an issue that’s related to screen resolution. But outright screen resolution is also stuck, with few monitors breaching the 4K barrier.
Even where there has been progress, the benefits are not always clear cut. Significant confusion surrounds the implementation of HDR support in PC monitors, for instance. That’s the polite way of describing a huge amount of HDR marketing FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). Likewise, refresh rates continue to escalate despite diminishing returns. And the price of USB Type-C connectivity remains painfully high.
In hindsight, it’s also disappointing that LCD technology remains dominant. Five years ago, you’d have put good money on OLED achieving at least some significant penetration into the PC monitor market. Save for some limited appearances in laptop PCs, it’s virtually non-existent.
If that’s a helicopter view of screen tech in 2020, it’s time to swoop down into the detail.
If there’s a single metric by which PC display technology disappoints in 2020, it has to be pixel density. A decade ago, it seemed inevitable that high-DPI displays would be the norm on the PC by now. The reality? DPI levels on most displays barely breach 100. In other words, there has been little or no change from 10 years ago.
DPI refers to dots per inch, a measure of how densely pixels are packed into a given area of screen. The denser or more numerous the pixels, the sharper and clearer the image. Fonts are particularly sensitive to pixel density, but it’s important for screen clarity and image detail, period.
Take the new HP Z38c, a desirable new 38-inch ultrawide monitor, with a $1,200 price tag. At first glance, the Z38c’s native resolution of 3840x1600 pixels sounds like plenty to justify its premium positioning. But do the pixel density math, and the result is a DPI of just 109 pixels per inch. That’s actually slightly worse than a bargain basement 1080p 20-inch monitor that you might pick up for $150.
Compared to smartphones, that kind of pixel density is pathetic. Even budget smartphones typically deliver upward of 300 dpi. Of course, smartphones and PC monitors are not directly comparable. The practical impact of pixel density in terms of image quality depends upon viewing distance. The shorter the viewing distance, the more pixels are required for a given level of detail or clarity.
Obviously, phone screens held in the hand are viewed at shorter distances than PC monitors. Apple’s “Retina” display standard provides a useful metric. The idea behind it is the human eye’s ability to resolve individual pixels. The point at which the pixels are so small they can’t be individually discerned is the point at which adding further pixels does nothing to improve sharpness and detail. You can achieve the “Retina” point by moving a display further away or by adding pixels.
Apple puts that point at around 300 dpi for smartphones and 200 dpi for desktop and laptop displays. It’s not an exact science and one can debate the distances, required DPI levels, and the acuity of the human eye. But Apple’s approach provides a tolerable rule of thumb and a context in which a mere 109 dpi obviously isn’t even close. That’s an observation confirmed when you compare the quality of fonts on a display with a DPI of around 100 with another good for 200 dpi. The latter has much cleaner, sharper fonts.
PIXEL PORTENT
Consider the broader PC monitor market and you’ll quickly find that vanishingly few products offer a true high-DPI experience. Take something like a 27-inch 4K monitor with fully 3840x2160 pixels. Impressive? Yes. But spread over that 27-inch diagonal, the result is 163 dpi. Not bad, but still well short of the Retina standard. Even a 24-inch 4K display only clocks in at 184 dpi.
What if you up the ante to 5K? LG’s 5K2K monitor, the UltraWide 34WK95U, is a 34-incher and delivers 163 dpi. Speaking of LG, it also offers the 27MD5KA UltraFine, a 27-inch model with 5120x2880 pixels. Finally, we have a monitor that can top 200 dpi – the UltraFine is good for 218 dpi. Still, what that monitor shows is that you need a heck of a lot of pixels to achieve truly high DPI on larger displays.
Apple’s new $8,499 32-inch Pro Display XDR, for instance, needs a 6K resolution of 6018x3384 to achieve the same 218 dpi as the LG UltraFine. And it’s not really PC-compatible. Another example is Dell’s 8K monitor, the UP3218K. With 7680x4320 pixels and a 32-inch diagonal, it’s good for 275 dpi. It’s a proper high-DPI display, for sure, but it’s very much the exception. And a $6,000 exception at that.
Speaking of exceptions, portable PCs are the cheapest and easiest way to get a high-DPI experience. Many notebook, tablet, and convertible PCs are at least optionally available with screen DPIs of 200 or more. But unless you prefer using a laptop screen, that’s not much help.
Sadly, there is little near-term prospect of things improving. Actual LCD panels, as opposed to entire monitors, are only made by a very small number of companies. If said companies aren’t offering large format high-DPI panels suitable for PC monitors, there’s nothing display manufacturers can do about that. Among the big players in LCD manufacturing are LG, Samsung, and AU Optronics. As a rule, they’re pretty open about their forward planning for upcoming LCD panels. For 2020, there’s no sign of any new panels that will bring high DPI into the mainstream PC monitor market.
Indeed, our research couldn’t uncover any new panels due out in 2020 with a resolution beyond 4K. As we’ve
seen, you need more than 4K to achieve a high-DPI experience on larger monitors. We’re not even sure if the new 6K panel in the Apple Pro Display XDR will be available for other monitors. The Pro Display’s panel is believed to be manufactured by LG, but it might be an Apple exclusive – at least for a time.
All of which means that 2020 won’t be the year 5K, 6K, or 8K becomes more accessible on the PC. Nor will it be the year that OLED makes the jump from TV to PC. It once seemed inevitable that OLED technology would eventually take over from LCD as the default technology for PC monitors, but here we are in 2020, and OLED availability in desktop PC monitors is virtually zero.
Again, the picture is a little better in the mobile market. A number of laptops, such as Razer’s Blade 15, can be had with OLED screens. But it’s increasingly looking as though OLED may never become dominant for desktop monitors. Instead, the PC monitor market may largely skip OLED and jump straight to microLED.
OLED suffers from a number of problems, including burn-in and asymmetric degradation, that are particularly problematic for the PC. In terms of the former, the persistent elements of the Windows interface, such as the taskbar, make burn-in much more likely. The longer the image on an OLED display remains static, the more likely that image is to be “burned in.” The result, on a PC, would be a faint image of the taskbar permanently burned into the display.
DEGRADING EXPERIENCE
As for degradation, the first problem is that OLED light output degrades over time and with use. What’s more, the individual subpixel diodes degrade at different rates. PC displays typically have pixels made of red, green, and blue subpixels. The blue diode subpixels in an OLED display degrade much faster than the red and green diodes. Without compensation, not only would your display become dimmer, but the color balance would shift as the blue diodes dimmed. Various technologies do exist to compensate for this, but PC monitors
are generally more sensitive to color shifts and involve more persistent interface elements than TVs.
The alternative is microLED. For starters, it’s brighter than OLED, but it’s also more stable than OLED. It degrades more slowly and the rate of decay of the red, green, and blue subpixels is more even. MicroLED is also much more resistant to burn-in while simultaneously offering all the advantages of OLED, such as effectively perfect or infinite contrast and ultrawide viewing angles.
Sounds like the perfect solution for the PC, right? One day, it probably will be. For now, there are serious limitations. MicroLED is very expensive to manufacture. Current implementations are also very powerhungry. Time will tell whether OLED can solve its degradation issues before microLED gets cheaper and more efficient. Our hunch is that microLED will win out eventually.
If neither OLED nor microLED are going to be a thing anytime soon, how is display tech actually progressing in 2020? One of the most obvious elements involves refresh rates, be that the overall rate of refresh or synching that refresh with the output of the video card. High refresh beyond the industry standard of 60Hz and adaptive synching have been available for years, but the technologies are becoming more refined and more widely adopted.
One of the two competing standards in this area is AMD’s FreeSync. It’s been around for six years, and for 2020, AMD announced what is effectively its third major iteration. This includes two new tiers: FreeSync Premium and FreeSync Premium Pro. FreeSync Premium adds a requirement of at least 120Hz refresh support at a minimum 1080p resolution and low frame rate compensation to FreeSync’s core adaptive sync capabilities. As for FreeSync Premium Pro, that adds accurate luminance and wide color gamut as part of a broader HDR certification.
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s G-Sync technology has also developed into a similar multi-tier proposition, with G-Sync Ultimate topping the table with HDR requirements. Overall, there are two takeaways that apply to both. Firstly, for the most part, both are mainly of interest to gamers. High refresh is of general benefit for all kinds of computing, albeit with less impact outside of gaming, but other features, such as frame synching and ultra-low latency, really are only of interest to gamers.
The other issue to be aware of is compatibility. Previously, Nvidia was attempting to lock down G-Sync to its own video cards and displays fitted with G-Sync boards. But Nvidia has now unlocked support for FreeSync monitors with Nvidia graphics cards via the G-Sync Compatible standard. If you buy a G-Sync enabled PC monitor, though, note that you still need an Nvidia graphics card for full functionality.
TRUTH HERTZ
Speaking of refresh rates, we fear 2020 will be the year that marketing madness takes hold. The first 360Hz gaming monitors have been announced (and on show at CES). But the added benefit, even for esports addicts, of the jump from 240Hz to 360Hz is debatable at best. That would be true with a display technology fully capable of rendering 360 frames per second, but it is itself debatable whether the pixels in LCD panels respond quickly enough to make 360Hz meaningful.
That’s before you ask whether you have a fast enough 3D card to play a given game at the 400fps or so average you’ll realistically need to be sure the frame rate rarely dips below 360Hz. Put simply, refresh rates have the makings of a technology where more of something is assumed to be better, even well beyond the point it adds any tangible benefit.
HDR in 2020 will likewise continue to be at the mercy of marketing misinformation. You can consult the boxout below and on the following page for more detail on how to make sense of
the various standards, what constitutes a true HDR monitor, and how color gamuts come into the equation. But the short version is that you want to look out for a display with local dimming and a sustained brightness of at least 600cd/m2.
On that subject, as 2020 moves forward, you can expect to see displays with more local dimming zones. Early HDR monitors had 300–400 zones. The first displays with 1,000 or more zones are now appearing – Acer’s Predator X32 packs 1,152.
With more zones will come better HDR visuals and fewer visual artifacts, such as light bleed or blooming around bright objects. Ultimately, only per-pixel lighting will deliver perfect HDR image quality. That isn’t going to be on offer in 2020.
Another area of improvement in 2020 will be pixel response. In 2019, the first monitors with IPS panel tech and claimed 1ms response capability appeared in the form of LG’s Ultragear 38GL950G and 27GL850. Those were large, premium models. By the end of 2019, AOC was offering its own more affordable 1ms IPS panel – the 24-inch Gaming 24G2U.
Of course, claimed response times are notoriously unreliable metrics of real-world pixel performance, but it’s clear IPS panels are improving and the gap to the fastest TN tech is closing. That’s good news if you want speediness and color accuracy in a single monitor. Even in the gaming segment, TN will be increasingly marginalized by higher quality IPS panels.
Overall, then, what will the PC monitor look like in 2020? Condensing the key trends into a single, notional model, sadly it won’t beat 4K when it comes to native resolution. Nor will it offer a true high-DPI experience. But it will have HDR capability, albeit flawed, thanks to the limitations of LCD panels, which in turn means it won’t be OLED, much less microLED.
It will also offer a wider and more accurate range of colors. It’ll be faster by pretty much every metric, be that pixel response or refresh rates. It’ll be pretty much any size or shape you desire. Its features will play ball with both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. And it will hook up to your PC with bandwidth to spare via a single cable providing the display signal, peripheral data, and, if you need it, charging power. The monitor of 2020 isn’t quite everything we’d hoped for, then, but it’s a pretty fine thing all the same.