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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

This article is a few years old, so the mention of OLED monitors is behind the times. They're available in desktop sizes (27-32") for around $1000 now, still expensive compared to LCDs, but getting more accessible.

https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/oled

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I’d never own a OLED for desktop use due to burn in.

They haven't solved it completely but it's getting better, we're at the point now where some manufacturers like Dell are confident enough to cover burn-in under warranty for 3 years. If they can get that up to 5 years I'd probably be okay with just upgrading after that point when it starts showing burn-in.

3 years isn’t nearly enough. My average screen lasts about a decade.

Your LCD is out of warranty by then too.

but no burn in on my LCD.

Warranties are irrelevant if the LCDs don't actually fail though.

Do you throw away everything you own when its warranty expires?

This is a completely reasonable take, though do note that they’ve come a long way over the past decade, in both improvements to materials and active management to reduce burn-in risk. I use a newish OLED TV for gaming and it’s both glorious and I’m not actually worried about burn-in.

I’m not sure I’d risk full-time desktop use, but in a couple of years? Maybe.

One man’s “active management” is another’s “blatantly obvious pulsing”. My barely a year old OLED TV reduces brightness so aggressive it makes bright white menus look lime they have an animated background. They don’t, it’s just the white dripping to almost gray after a second or two as the whole display dims.

You can reduce this effect by dripping the peak nuts down… but then you lose much of the contrast ratio that’s the main point of OLED in the first place

I’ll also add that there have been several TV manufacturers that swear they’ve solve burn in, but the rtinge long term testing is… rather less kind.

My Gigabyte OLED monitor is 2 years old now and gets used for many hours on most days and shows no changes. I bugged out the time counter for a few months by putting the panel in to service mode, but still it is up to 4040 hours, or 5.5 hours per day for 2 years.

Your other post mentions the screen brightness dropping with white menus open, but that is not because of a burn in protection feature, but instead it's because of limits on the total power consumption of the panel (either because of power efficiency laws, or too much heat).

It's the same thing. Heat is the major cause of burn in.

That's a tradeoff like everything else in life. You're trading visual quality for longevity.

For me the pulse width modulation is just too annoying: it causes terrible headaches.

OLED itself doesn't solve motion blur. But at least the Alienware one they recommend has a high enough refresh rate to mostly solve it. Getting such high refresh rates at 4K is sort of unrealistic without some other visual tradeoffs at least. Though of course motion blur only "really" matters in certain games. (To my eyes it becomes "acceptable" at around the 144 Hz level.)

The BlurBusters site has explored various other approaches over the years. Black frame insertion to reduce persistence has been tried, but requires high brightness and can create flicker. AI upscaling or interpolation stuff could help with frame rates.

I tried the Samsung OLED, a recent one. It was absolutely burning my eyes. Headache, eye strain, the whole nine yards. Switched back to my ancient Samsung LCD and it all went away. My working theory was something about PWM modulation in the backlighting. Either way I don't need it.

Yeah. PWM is used to control brighness of OLEDs. Some people are sensitive to PWM frequencies as high as 200Hz.

I use LG C2 OLED's and I experience eye straining that I don't on LCD monitors. I haven't had the time to look into the cause.

First I would make sure the brightness isn't too high, and then I would consider if the problem is text on screen. The LG OLED panels have WRGB pixel layout, so it doesn't work quite right with the likes of ClearType on Windows. Instead I use MacType on my PC with a modified profile and 117% zoom in windows, and now it's fine to me (the font was an issue when I first got my OLED).

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