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Comment by babypuncher | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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