While the headline implies it's talking about LCD displays, it actually refers to LCD panel technology. The innovation is in the backlight technology behind the LCD panel, so LCD displays still have an exciting future ahead of them.
For Premium tier the cost of elevating the picture quality to a competitive level (with elaborate backlight tech, multiple layers of LCD, etc.) is simply too high.
Samsung was only riding LCD in premium TVs for so long because they didnt have the technology for large-size OLED. So they spent a ton of money to establish the "QLED" brand as a new name for "LCD with yet another backlight" and started explaining people that brightness (not black-level or contrast) is the most important thing for a TV (because uniform LCD backlight can be brighter than per-pixel OLED)
There's lots of methods now to make this degradation more uniform on OLED, like slightly shifting the image to distribute the load onto multiple subpixels, "cleaning" the panel when its switched off, down to measuring the operating hours of individual pictures and adjusting the brightness of surrounding pixels to blend the degradation.
Overall you can choose what you want to degrade over those 10 years: The LED brightness and color-accuracy of a whole zone / backlight unit (LED-LCD), or have the OLED panel actively compensate its aging (which has gotten ALOT better in the past years)
Either way, I wouldn't put my money on QLED (which is not a technology but a brand). QLED is actually far worse on lifetime than OLED [1], but as it was driven by the marketing powerhouse of Samsung this information is barely known. Considering how expensive it is to produce and that it was basically only made by Samsung to buy time until they can produce OLED as well, I wouldn't expect it to become actually a mature technology. It's more likely that they will replace the Quantum Dot backlight with something cheaper and still keep the brand "QLED" (if they haven't done that already).
AH-IPS LCD panels with zoned LED backlight probably still provide the most stable picture quality over longer time of use, compromising on image-quality compared to OLED. But the last really good TV with such a panel was produced quite a few years ago already...
I do care about seeing ghost letters or shapes on top of the latest TV series I'm watching.
Edit: The QLED article is from 2019, that's quite a few yers ago for cutting edge tech. I imagine tech is constantly improving.
https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/longevity-burn-in-test-updat...
This is a great overview demo of current panels! You can already see some very slight degradation in some of LGs OLEDs, but many of the Sony/Visio (and Samsung) OLED panels.
The others mostly look like standard LCD and DDI/Flex defects rather than burn-in so far.
But none of this is new. In reality, I barely heard people complain about their LCDs becoming more and more weak in brightness and color-tinted (usually yellow) each year. And yet, all of this happened to 100% of all LED-LCD panels.
> Edit: The QLED article is from 2019, that's quite a few yers ago for cutting edge tech. I imagine tech is constantly improving.
Yeah, there's alot of research ongoing to improve QD lifetime as a foundation for new LED technology. Here's one from Dec.2022 [1], and one from as late as 2023 [2], all with the subject of solving performance stability of the technology to become on-par (!) with common LED.
> I don't care much about average panel degradation.
> I do care about seeing ghost letters or shapes on top of the latest TV series I'm watching.
Nobody cares about "luminance degradation", they just dont want ghosting
With OLED, not so much. OLED does have tech to compensate based on total pixel usage. You might see that if you tried to change a panel without the electronics. I'm not aware of how widespread it is, but I know iphones can do it.
And "ghosting" are artifacts on fast movement due to a lag in panel refresh, it's something entirely different.
I think you're going too far with your statement. OLED/qd-oled and to a lesser degree WOLED all suffer from significant burn-in, which makes them pretty bad for desktop use.
Previous LCD technologies will degrade over the years by losing luminance and color accuracy, but that's a pretty minor issue compared to OLED as far as I'm concerned.
Most all mid tier LCD TVs currently use QD (whether in the backlight or the color filter layers). They don't use Blue QD (only longer lifetime Red/Green), but crystal InGaN in the Blue backlight. Other lower end LCDs use RG phosphor instead of QD to produce white, which also has long term burn-in issues, but as you mention they are not individual to pixels. Color shift of the (global backlight) screens over years can be compensated, but since environmental lighting has a bigger effect on perceived color, I'm not sure why you'd bother (mini-LED can be worse).
Even the very best currently shipping OLEDs (not yet phosphorescent Blue) have visible burn-in at ~2000hr even with image shifting de-contrast techniques. Early 2014 QD (Red/Green) have visible burn-in at ~7khr and modern ones about 20khr. They're about 10x better than OLEDs, but you could still see it several years in (rather than months in for OLED).
I've got no great love for QLED, but R/G QD just doesn't have the same level of burn-in problems that fluorescent Blue OLED does, and neither do Blue InGaN LEDs.
https://en.tab-tv.com/samsung-has-released-recommendations-f...
I'm including this link, because the SID.org papers are all paywalled.
I frankly don't know how you technically define "visible burn-in" in context of QD (do you mean actual pure QD tech or Samsungs mixed use of the tech for QLED TVs?).
If we can agree, that: 1.) The jargon "burn-in" on OLED describes the luminance degradation of individual sub-pixels (i.e. a weaker red because the operation hours of a red sub-pixel were much higher than its neighbours).
2.) Samsung's "QLED" is a brand for a LCD panel with the backlight created using R/G QD and blue LED (instead of blue/yellow LED). The backlight on standard QLED is separated in ~700 zones of the display, so you have huge clusters of pixels using the same backlight zone.
Then: What is the equal meaning of "burn-in" then in the context of QLED? The luminance degradation of the whole zone?
Or is it the "legacy" meaning of burn-in on LCD: The occurence of weaker/dead pixels due to issues in the TFT layer (broken/weak transistors no longer properly rotating the crystals)?
Either way, I can't confirm and don't agree that OLED TVs will see a visible "burn-in" after ~2000hrs of normal use. First-gen models yes, but definitely not currently shipping models.
Similar to standard definitions of Mura a method of defining visible burn-in, you'd have to define the burn image (16pix B&W block or CNN Logo?), the detection image (64 Grey?), viewing distance (30deg FoV?), and visible contrast (+/4 MND?). I guarantee you all the OEMs have a spec.
Here's a set of modern 20hr/day tests at 6 months (posted above) where OLED has visible degradation (mostly Sony/Viso but also Samsung and LG). The new ones are definitely better!
https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/longevity-burn-in-test-updat...
The research paper describes the lifetime and degradation in a uniform setup, as it's research for foundational QD-tech, not for TV panels.
There's alot of research ongoing to improve QD lifetime as a foundation for new LED technology. Here's one from Dec.2022 [1], and one from as late as 2023 [2], all with the subject of solving performance stability of the technology to become on-par (!) with common LED.
Don't organic LEDs also degrade more than their "normal" counterparts?
> Overall you can choose what you want to degrade over those 10 years: The LED brightness and color-accuracy of a whole zone / backlight unit (LED-LCD), or have the OLED panel actively compensate its aging (which has gotten ALOT better in the past years)
I'd imagine it would be FAR easier to compensate the backlight as you just need to re-calibrate one string of LEDs that all see same load over lifetime of the monitor vs somehow tracking per-subpixel usage of each OLED
Yeah, amplified due to their much smaller size, having less surface area for heat dissipation, and also depending on pixel-color in RGB-OLED setups. On TV's WOLED panels are used instead of RGB-OLED, which allows for better heat-distribution and a uniform lifetime regardless of pixel-color.
> I'd imagine it would be FAR easier to compensate the backlight as you just need to re-calibrate one string of LEDs that all see same load over lifetime of the monitor vs somehow tracking per-subpixel usage of each OLED
For luminance there is nothing to compensate, as it simply degrades uniformly. The peak-brightness is simply reducing over time.
Color-shifts cannot be re-calibrated that well because the shift happens due to the chemical decomposition process of the phosphor in each LED, which causes the color of the light going INTO the color-filter to shift (the base light that is filtered for RGB is no longer white).
Once it starts it's not a binary process, the color keeps shifting. Manual recalibration often has no real benefit then, as the color-shift continues and is not uniform across the whole display.
But you can change white balance of most monitors right ? So they at the very least need cold white and warm white LEDs, just change balance of those. using RGB LEDs in backlight could also allow for that correction.
Or something more expensive? Not sure if OLED is more expensive or not, but they are already using that as a backlight on the high-end. Specifically, blue which seems to be the issue for QLEDs if the paper is anything to go by.
If they replace it with something more expensive they usually give it a new name to sell the higher price, like "Neo QLED"
TV takes 10 minutes to load Netflix because it's part of a botnet? Better buy a new one.
It happened to me and it happened to a friend of mine, just a few months apart.
Never ever connect a Samsung TV to the Internet under any circumstances.
So if they're bricked after two years you could take it to the retailer.
Consumers don't trust manufavturers. If I pay 2x premium I have zero trust the product is better made or will last longer. My $300 laptop worked for 10 years, $3000 laptop has issues after 2 years.
We have a Toshiba TV that has lasted 15 years. Kinda getting to the end of it's usefull life - its 720p.
On the other hand, I don't expect image technology to advance at the same rate any more, we are at the usefull limit of resolution for example. So maybe if I was buying today, I would actually keep the TV for 20 years.
I'm confused — why are you talking about trusting "manufacturers" as a whole? Isn't the whole point of your anecdote that one manufacturer is trustworthy and the other is not?
Well maybe there are a handful, in some markets, but Miele does not make TVs
Personally, I know more about clothes. Once you switch from fast fashion (Zara, Bershka, Uniqlo) to quality brands (for me, it's Rick Owens, Margiela, Thom Krom and McQueen, adjust for your personal style), they do last a lot longer — I still wear T-shirts that I bought in 2016. However, it means that I shop much less often, own much less clothes and they're all the same style (and the same colour — full black). And I see that people pay lip service to degrading quality, but what majority of them _actually_ want is a lot of regular dopamine from shopping and a wide variety of garments.
You can eat out at fast-food everyday, or spend the same budget to eat at a Michelin-stared place once a couple of weeks (1 star; 2 or 3 stars it would be once a month or more). People tend to choose the former, but then blame "the industry" for their own choices.
I DO notice OLED burn-in, so that <<is>> a problem.
And for exactly the same reason most people buying high-end computers and phones won't — the tech will have moved on in 5 years to such a degree that newer products will be significantly better.
I have a 15" Samsung CRT TV from the 90's that still works great. I use it for retrogaming.
> vast majority people buying bleeding-edge OLED TVs (yours truly included) will not use the same TV for 10 years.
IMHO people mostly upgrade their TV because a bigger one comes out. At some point we will reach the maximum practical size for a home TV (kinda like CD drives maxed out at 52x) and then I think people will buy them less. TVs are already kinda cheap and boring and if they don't keep getting bigger, the average consumer will eventually treat it as a commodity item (and maybe it will be priced that way too).
I'm not saying those people don't exist — they clearly do!
But those are not people who buy the most expensive/best TV's on the market.
But you're very unlikely to experience it compared to past technologies, even if you are displaying a static image for extremely long periods
I've seen the video where the guy leaves a bright high-contrast static image on his Nintendo Switch OLED for 10,000 hours before finally seeing a small amount of burn-in, but that's not the level that should concern average users. Was just curious if typical large screens fared any worse than the new Switch.
It's a TV!!! There shouldn't be any "negligent" :-)
Some people are fine with tiptoeing around the problem, I imagine most people just don't do anything and mess up their TV.
I shouldn't have to configure FVWM for 20 days to be able to operate the appliance correctly.
The newer TVs can detect that scenario and turn the TV off automatically, unless you specifically disable that setting.
TVs are a luxury good, and there will always be ways to be negligent with anything. Leaving them out in the rain is negligent. Some cleaners will harm the screen, I'm sure. Using them in a too-hot or too-cold environment will harm them. I don't expect my TV to be battle-hardened, and I'm certainly not going to pay the price for that. Instead, I'll take care of it.
1. Large-format OLED maximum brightness is very low. LG C2 peak SDR brightness is some 425 nits. A Samsung Neo-QLED QN90B does 1200 nits, and an iPhone 14 (small OLED) does 800 nits. In my experience, a room with windows facing the sun with thin curtains require 1000-1500 nits SDR to be comfortably legible. 2000 would be nice to have, but that's not available for the masses yet.
2. That SDR brightness is only maintained for a 10% window, and quickly drops off for larger bright areas. At 50%, it's only 350 nits. The QN90B does 850 nits sustained at 50%.
3. Same panel does peak 6-700 nit HDR, well below the 1000-4000 nits generally needed for HDR content. An iPhone 14 does 1200 nits, The QN90B does around 1700 nits. The high peak is needed to give proper "blinding" effect to e.g. skies or lights, as opposed to just looking like SDR-style bright white surfaces, especially outside a dark cinema room.
4. WOLED, which is the dominant panel technology for large high-end OLED panels, lose color saturation quickly as they approach their (already low) maximum brightness, due to relying on a white subpixel for raw luminance.
5. MiniLED backlight for LCD with 10k+ diming zones - while a stopgap - get dimming artifacts far enough down to be competitive on contrast, while destroying OLED in brightness and color saturation.
Large-panel OLED will beat LCD, but right now it is has many shortcomings. QD-OLED shows significant promise, with latest generations finally starting to see some decent brightness, but it's early (and rtings report both thermal throttling and some quite unfortunate burn-in behavior on those).
And yes, 1000 nits+ for SDR is retina-searing once the sun sets, but for those who have forgotten how sunlight feels I can report that it is quite bright and requires effort to outshine. Something like ambient light control is necessary to adjust throughout the day to not accidentally go blind.
Also, no amount of screen brightness can make dark scenes visible in a bright room. You have to make the room darker anyway, so why bother with a brighter screen?
Sure, to get the full cinema experience you should darken the room, or just watch at night. But having a bright and legible screen without having to close the curtains is still worth a lot.
Darkening rooms in daytime for non-cinema watching is just a workaround, which is both impractical and not necessarily preferred. 1000-1500 nits is not perceived as bright in daylight, but is perfectly comfortable and legible. A little more would be nice, but not much.
(If you are light sensitive and it hurts because of that, then this is a different topic - but that is not the norm)
Darkening the environment is the only option for displaying any dark colours and it happens to make high screen brightness unnecessary.
The QD-OLEDs from Samsung which use a similar trick as their "Quantum-Dot" LCDs do, also hit similar levels: https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/s95c-oled#page-tes...
Real scene SDR brightness is all that matters for use in a bright room, as it represents the overall brightness of the screen when playing normal content. HDR brightness on the other hand is only observed in certain scenes of particular HDR content mastered to use it - not to mention that such HDR content is more likely to be consumed in a dark room to enjoy the darker details not present in SDR.
I think the limiting factor right now on those new OLED sets is thermal throttling and power limits. But all is not bad - it shows great promise of near a future where self-emissive panels have food brightness.
Still, that's 500 for the those OLED sets vs 1200 for the QN90B.
My current brightness settings are at 30% when watching TV at night. "Bright room" settings bumps pixel brightness to 45%, which is good enough for a room with windows on 3 out of 4 walls. It is much brighter then a 10 year old LCD it replaced. And I had no problem using that old one until I put two screens side by side.
For reference, I have my QN95A on max brightness (with auto-dim to not be killed at night), and it's not quite as bright as I want, but bright enough to be comfortable - and I don't think I'm being unreasonable. I do have windows both left and right and can look straight at the sun from my couch position twice a day (sometimes both ways due to neighboring reflections), and for WAF reasons my curtains are the thin kind.
Maybe if your TV is facing a window that’s more of a problem, but if so I’d suggest not doing that. You’re never going to get a good experience from a TV facing a light source because of nothing else it will reflect off the screen.
I don't have walls that don't face huge windows in my livingroom, so I had to splurge for a Samsung Q90. It does well for the most part. On sunny days I still miss even more brightness.
The main downside I can note is that the dimming zones are way too large - especially noticeable with local dimming set to High, and credits scrolling. Not noticeable for normal content though. Mini-LED backlight would have made it indistinguishable from most OLEDs in anything but the darkest of cinema rooms...
Moving bright content on dark background reveals the dimming zone resolution as the zones chase the content - credits is the main thing that comes to mind, where the text brightness fluctuates as it transitions zones. A circular loading indicator can also trip this, but the TV recognizes it after a rotation and then evenly illuminates the path.
Turning down the dimming from max would likely help, but some may be surprised to hear that credits are not my main content priority.
The brightness is great for my bright living room though, and worlds apart from the OLED sets I've seen in similar settings.
As an aside, super happy I got the 2021 - a friend got the S95B, and the newer Tizen UI is way more intrusive and more ad-filled.
But even in those areas I'm confident that its existing tech, I doubt that there's alot of investment going on.
WOLED panels are on a trajectory from Premium to High-Tier with production volume increasing each year, with RGB-OLED increasing in panel-size each year as well. The window for investing into R&D for a large-volume LCD-panel which outperforms OLED in accuracy but at a lower price has already closed.
Micro led truly aims to just have a single LED per (sub) pixel.
Perhaps I'm a pessimist, but from the launch of the first mainstream OLED tvs several years ago, I've been hearing "OLED is just a stopgap, Microled is where it's at, and that's not far off now".
Ten years later ... oled is still where it's at, or LCD for a lot of people. I know these things take time, but the anticipation of this tech seems to have lasted at least a decade so far.
My point isn't necessarily that Microled is endlessly delayed, so much as that people are endlessly talking about it, have been for years, and it's still years away from even high-end consumer models. I don't remember the same for OLED, in fact I remember people getting very hyped over LCD vs Plasma, and OLED not really getting a mention as a tv tech, even when it was in phones. Perhaps it's just my memory.
You can actually buy a MicroLED TV today, but they're huge and expensive:
https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/micr...
Soon thereafter, the thrust from the cooling fans causes the tv to leave forever, but for those first few minutes it is a viewing experience beyond any other. Just last week, one was spotted cruising past the freeway at low altitude, out to sea. Some say it is still going.
Mind you, the display technology doesn't produce mind excess heat. That would be the smart-tv cpu as it loads up a barrage of ads with which to torment watchers with. Skip ad 14:56s
Gonna hit wiki.
Edit: it's not LCD hehe. I have memorized some incorrect info
Mine still works great, although it still draws ~200 watts of energy.