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Comment by powersurge360 | Hacker News Reader

I had the dell ultrawide OLED monitor from their Alienware sub brand. It burned in enough within three years that I was able to get it warrantied. While it was away, I auditioned a miniled Samsung G7 with the intent to sell the repaired Dell if I liked the Samsung. Surprisingly, I found the uneven lighting and colors to be more disappointing out of the box than a three year old OLED panel with burn in.

OLED is unfortunately consumable but it is the highest fidelity consumer panel tech you can get atm. The MiniLEDs in Apple’s MacBooks are reasonable substitutions, albeit subject to blurring. I haven’t seen any other non-OLED compare.

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FYI your Samsung televisor may not have been actual "mini led" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/tcl-is-right-to-ques...

Yea, and that’s part of the struggle. There are so many dishonest standards printed on displays. Rooting out which HDR standard guarantees _true_ HDR is a similar rabbit hole.

I've been seeing people go crazy over these new "RGB" mini LED panels and as an OLED user for almost 10 years now I just don't get it.

The first thing I do to test any LCD panel is fire up an episode of Star Trek: The Next generation. Invariably, one of two things happens as soon as we are presented with an exterior shot of the Enterprise

1. LCD backlight bleed makes space look dark grey/blue instead of black as originally intended.

2. The localized dimming kicks in, presenting truly black space, but rendering the stars (which are smaller than the smallest local dimming zones) super dim or nonexistent.

These latest generation RGB local dimming LCD panels being touted as OLED killers still fall under the 2nd scenario, they don't actually fix the problem at all. LCD is functionally a dead end when it comes to picture quality.

I might just be super used to IPS panels, but I have literally never noticed nor cared about the backlight issues, and to me knowing that my monitor won't be e-waste within 3 years is still worth it even if the picture quality is a tad nicer

I have an 8 year old OLED TV in my basement, a 4 year old OLED in my living room, and a 3 year old OLED monitor for my desktop. With proper care, none of these are showing any real signs of burn-in. All of them absolutely destroy the 4 year old reasonably high end Samsung LCD in my bedroom in terms of picture quality.

Touted by who, though? Proper reviews and tests will catch such things quickly.

Lots of reputable reviewers on YouTube. Some do catch this problem, but they value the greater full screen peak brightness of the LCD panels. What the new RGB backlighting does specifically that they like is narrow the gap between OLED and LCD in terms of color accuracy in wide gamut colorspaces.

I think most people run their TVs too bright, usually because they use them in spaces with terrible lighting conditions (i.e. TV mounted too high above a fireplace facing a west-facing window). I think it's easier to control the lighting in my house than it is to make my favorite TV show look good on an LCD.

Obviously that's still a valid use case, and one where LCD genuinely makes more sense than OLED, but my issue is with the displays being touted as "OLED Killers" when they aren't; they are displays that excel in a very different set of circumstances than an OLED. If I replaced the 8 year old OLED in my basement where 2,500 nits of full screen brightness would be downright painful to look at, the RGB miniLED panel would be a straight downgrade.

And I will still happily take the LCD "dead end" over the regressive burn-in OLEDs.

My oldest OLED is 8 years old and doesn't have any burn-in. Just don't leave it on some shitty news channel 24/7 and the automatic panel refresh cycles take care of the rest.

Have you had IPS panels? I have a similar Alienware ultrawide monitor but with IPS panel. IPS still remains my favorite. Didn't dare to get OLED for computer monitor since I expected burn-in over the years. OLED could maybe have a little bit better colors, but I got LG's OLED TV a few years back and was a bit disappointed to see that the image isn't perfectly even (more clearly visible with grey image) and sometimes with dark areas there's some kind of barely noticeable weird edge effect. Kind of like the OLEDs just lighting up after reaching some threshold. And some other very minor effects like little uneven flickering of a fire in a dark scene.

I have used IPS, and a good IPS is certainly more affordable and more durable but it just doesn’t stand up to OLED, to my eyes. The uneven grays are a known fault in OLEDs but imo the raised blacks in IPS and IPS glows are worse compromises.

Still, I probably would work on an IPS if I didn’t have limited desk space and needed my monitor to pull double duty for entertainment as well.

Right, almost forgot IPS glow. I have probably gotten a bit accustomed to it and if I'd use OLED monitor for extended period, I'd probably start noticing issues with IPS more. That said, I think this current IPS panel is also better than some other Dell IPS monitors I've used at work previously and has less noticeable glow.

I have an iirc 8 year old oled tv from LG. It has terrible burn in, especially red was hit hard. I wonder how true rgb might compare. The picture quality is probably worse, but if it holds up longer than oled it might be worth the trade off.

One anecdote for another - I have an LG CX which released in 2020. It's on basically 24/7 (rotating photos through a Chromecast when not actively in use), occasionally I'll turn it off at night. It does regular pixel cleaning on its own that sleeps the panel for a few minutes.

I've not seen any burn-in.

All of these burnout 'tests' I've seen (this one, and RTings as well) purposefully use static content and are basically abusing the panel in a way that is specifically advised against. I find them pretty useless for anything not an office TV on the wall running CNN 24/7, which I will never be doing myself.

I don't think anyone familiar with the tech will deny using these panels in such a way will cause burn-in, even the test here:

> ...static desktop content such as web browsers, document editors, and spreadsheets, along with creative apps like Photoshop and Premiere. We don't recommend using an OLED monitor like this. These displays are best suited to content consumption[...]

I think it's pretty avoidable on a TV, the real issue comes from what you need out of a desktop monitor. I have a Dell/Alienware (Samsung QD-OLED Panel) that's about a year old without any visible issues, but it's still early to tell in that case.

The tech has gotten better, but the problem still very much exists.

This one isn't really a "burnout test" though, that's just what they call it to get clicks. They're just using an oled monitor as their primary for daily work. This represents a pretty normal use case, it isn't a torture test like what RTings does. I don't see a world where I'd buy a monitor and not use it for static content the majority of the time.

I thought LG uses color filters (or quantum dots) with the same OLED color for every sub pixel. Which would mean individual colors can't age differently. That would only be possible for RGB OLEDs. But even for RGB, you would assume red degrades the slowest, because it has the longest wavelength and therefore the least energy.

Maybe the newer ones? Mine is pretty old as I've said. It's very visible when pure red is displayed. Other colors are fine.

Very strange.

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