I recently smashed my laptop into my desktop computer monitor by accident (the laptop won), and thus need to replace it.
My previous monitor is a few years old, and I understand there’s a lot of advances in display tech over the last few years.
How are the OLED ones these days? Is burn-in still an issue? It’s a monitor I’ll be using for work a lot, which means parts of the screen (the Mac menu bar and dock, for example) will stay static for many hours a day, every day, for years on end.
I work in a room with a lot of natural light, and after LASIK, my eyes get really uncomfortable whenever there’s a big difference between light and dark. So I need a monitor that has a high sustained upper brightness and/or contrast ratio and can keep up with the daylight in the room. I understand OLED is unbeatable for contrast ratios as of now, but maybe other techs (microLED? quantum LED? I lost track of all the marketing jargon) are good enough?
I’m currently trialing a Dell IPS monitor (not OLED) and it’s all right… the contrast is pretty lackluster and causes eye strain no matter what I set the brightness and contrast to. I’m thinking of returning it and finding a better model for my needs.
Any recommendations or warnings? Budget is around $700, give or take; it’s something I’m willing to spend a bit more on since I’ll be using it for many many hours a day. I’d prefer a 34" ultrawide or thereabouts.
I’m using a 42" LG C3 OLED for my desktop computer and it’s a super monitor for computers.
One little nitpick: it doesn’t have DisplayPort inputs - only HDMI.
Burn-in is no longer much of an issue. LG (and other manufacturers) have safeguards built into the monitor to prevent that.
Can I ask what you mean by that? From what I’ve been researching, it sounded like they will enter some sort of pixel self-refresh mode for 10 minutes every 4 hours (which would be a dealbreaker, since I can’t always reliably time my breaks to coincide with that, and if I were in the middle of a meeting or whatever, I wouldn’t want to have suddenly stop and wait for the monitor). Or the kind that jiggles the pixels around would probably be really distracting while I’m trying to work.
Is that still the way it works now, or is it less intrusive these days? I usually keep the monitor on probably 10-12 hours a day or longer, and there are parts of the screen that will show the exact same bright white pixels 99% of that time (like in the menu bar).
The Dell has an awesome Thunderbolt hub built-in (which is the main reason I chose it), but the image quality is quite terrible across the board… worse than my last monitor, which was 5-6 years old and a third of its price. I made the mistake of trying to buy a monitor and a hub at the same time; guess they had to cut corners with the display technology there.
I wonder if maybe a LED VA panel would offer sufficiently good contrast without the downsides of OLED… and they’d be brighter than either an OLED or an IPS panel, it seems like?
I bought an Alienware AW3423DWF as my desktop monitor just over a year ago. It’s on 12+ hours a day and I don’t notice any burn-in.
It asks me to do a pixel refresh every so often, which frankly I usually ignore–it can easily be cancelled.
Contrast ratio is as good as expected. I was a teeny bit disappointed at first because text isn’t quite as sharp as an LCD, due to the different subpixel arrangement, but I quickly got used to it. I mainly care about brightness for HDR mode, which is excellent–but I expect that it has high peak brightness as well in normal modes.
Overall, I’m quite happy with it. Looks fantastic in Cyberpunk 2077 and others that use HDR. You didn’t mention games but I know you post in the games thread, so presumably that’s somewhat important.
OLED monitors are not bright, they mostly excel in extremely dark rooms where you want minimal glare. RTings is an extremely reputable website and they have a table of the peak brightness of every monitor they’ve tested:
OLEDs top out at about 300 cd vs 800 for some IPS/VA panels. I highly doubt you need 800 for anything though, it would be uncomfortable to look at.
What are you primarily using the monitor for? Reading text? Watching movies? Video/picture editing? Playing games? Most office work is not super demanding on monitors so people are going to have a hard time giving you recommendations unless you are pretty precise in nailing down what dissatisfies you about the current IPS screen.
Is it impossible for you to adjust the lighting of the room? It might make much more sense to fix the lighting than compensate with a monitor that’s going to add even more unhealthy light to your eyeballs.
The Dell Ultrasharp is generally known for quite good image quality so I’m puzzled as to where exactly you’re finding it lacking. It’s possible there might be a misconfiguration issue where you’re feeding it the wrong colorspace or some other error.
If you’re on a mac, you might consider the Apple Studio Display. It’s overpriced for what it is but it has the Apple “we just figured out everything for you and you don’t have to worry about corners cut” ease of worry.
If you have an Apple Store near you, the stores are generally extremely bright and you can go test one for yourself to see if you’re dissatisfied in any way.
I saw one of these at the Best Buy today, but yeah, the text rendering is pretty noticeably awful, especially with ClearType on. I’m on a Mac, though, so I’m not sure how that will handle subpixel rendering on an OLED… RTINGs said last month they’ll add it as a standard test soon, but don’t currently do that Hmm. Helpful to know that the pixel refresh can be postponed, though, thanks!
I mean, if there were some affordable monitor that’s great for both, that’d be great… but office stuff comes first. Which means SDR, primarily, and sustained brightness + a good contrast. I could live without HDR altogether (and prefer it off, actually, to prevent the super bright patches that cause eye strain).
I grew up playing Lode Runner on an Apple IIe, so really any monitor today feels like the Holodeck already
Primarily I just need something with a lot of screen real estate and very good text display and brightness/contrast. If it can also game well, fantastic, but that’s a tertiary concern.
Now I wonder if maybe if 3-4 standard 1080p or 1440p monitors would be better. It’s just a hassle trying to daisy-chain them together…
I’d go with a LCD monitor that uses IPS technology.
I’ve had two of them for years. No longer available the Asus ROG PG279Q have been excellent for me in every regard. Many times I have left them on overnight and zero burn-in.
Can OLED beat them? Maybe but I seriously doubt you’d ever notice it (general “you”). Image quality is excellent and they are fast (and this is with several year-old tech).
If burn-in is a real worry for you then get an LCD-IPS panel that is fast.
I will not say burn-in is impossible but it is least likely with an LCD panel.
It’s about 80% office work and 20% games. But the gaming performance doesn’t really matter.
I think it’s this particular IPS screen on the Dell that’s bad — it’s just not a very good display. The integrated hub is very useful, but I think they had to cut corners for the display itself. I’ve had IPS ViewSonics before that were amazing (I was also younger then, so maybe my vision was just better). The contrast on this particular monitor is pretty awful (2000:1, compared to the 50,000:1 or so on my Macbook’s native display or the nearly infinity:1 on OLEDs). Seems like many VA panels will offer 4000:1 or 5000:1 ratios; I wonder if that’d be noticeably better.
The Mac’s built-in display sets a pretty high standard, which doesn’t help things… most other screens I see pale in comparison, even the OLED ones. Wish Apple made ultrawides
Hmm, that’s a really good point though. I need to study up on that. My eyes have been very uncomfortable ever since LASIK a few years ago, but I don’t know what the optimal room lighting should be (very bright? very dim? moderate?). It’d be nice to have some natural light in there just so it doesn’t feel like a lonely cave all day, every day, but maybe there’s a way to balance that out with the eyestrain…
Any tips on that front would also be appreciated, if anyone has any!
I’d not by a dedicated monitor for your use let alone an OLED.
Get a smart TV monitor 40" 4k HDR if you can find and you will get far more value for money and much greater choice of brightness levels if you get something with HDR.
As long as you can get 1-1.5m from the screen you can go as high as 55" which is what I use.
Real life has bright patches that don’t cause eye strain. In a game where they’re moving around and limited to small portions of the screen, like neon signs, I don’t think they cause any problems. Maybe the opposite, since one of the benefits of HDR is more accurate color rendering.
I have a pretty well-lit room during the day, with two large windows. I don’t get direct sunlight, but it’s pretty bright (lots of reflections off white stucco), and I haven’t had any problems with the screen washing out. Good black levels and an anti-reflective surface help a lot.
That said, in your position, I’d just get a cheap LCD. My previous screen was a Nixeus NX-EDG34S with VA panel… color quality wasn’t great, or contrast, and it had some bleed issues… but it was slightly better for office work than my current one due to the text rendering. Really, everything but that is kinda irrelevant for the desktop. I do like a high refresh rate for smooth scrolling/mouse, though.
I believe this is a Lasik side effect? It never used to bother me before the operation. Afterward, whether from the monitor or driving at light or just HDR patches on the TV (which is really noticeable), it actively hurts and causes eyestrain and a mild headache. I have to use a special dark mode reader on everything these days, which helps, but otherwise it can be really difficult having the screen bright enough to see but not so bright as to hurt can be really challenging. Lasik made my overall vision worse (than with glasses), lowered my contrast sensitivity by quite a lot, and dramatically increased my glare sensitivity. (I got the operation for athletic stuff, not office work… it’s definitely made office work a lot harder, unfortunately.)
Hence I’m hoping that OLEDs or similar high-local-contrast stuff can help. Not sure that it will, but thought it might be worth trying.
There are also some emerging transflective and reflective LCD displays with no backlight, similar to eInk readers or the old One Laptop Per Child screens — fully readable in sunlight or ambient room lighting, like a newspaper would be. But they are still very small and expensive right now.
I wonder if there’s some sort of optometrist-ergonomic adjacent specialist that specializes in monitor display technology for people with eye disorders, lol. Would be quite niche, I imagine…
I have LASIK too but don’t get eyestrain like that. I know that experiences vary, though.
It’s possible that higher brightness will help. It’s easier to focus in bright sunlight since your pupils are more contracted. And you don’t want large differences in brightness between the screen and room.
Not sure what to suggest overall, though. Would be cool to have a transflective display, though.
Try out the Apple Studio Display in a store then. It’s not an ultrawide but it is 5K and it’s going to be the closest you can get to a macbook screen in a 27" form factor.
Honestly don’t know. I’m highly skeptical of most of the claims about them… but maybe there’s some element of truth.
That said, most computers today allow you to turn down the blue levels on a schedule. This should get most of the benefit. Though maybe not all, since doing it on the computer can only reduce the output of the blue channel, while glasses can impose a frequency cutoff.
I’d say to try out the software feature (Windows calls this “Night light”; I don’t know about Mac) first, and if that makes a difference, it might be worth trying glasses for a better effect.
Finding glasses that aren’t themselves a scam might be a challenge, but I did find this review site:
They don’t mention this effect, but eliminating blue can make it easier to focus, too. Basically it’s impossible to focus on blue and red/green at the same time.
This is why a 4k hIdef TV works so well. The text remains crisp at full resolution and you have equivalent workspace of 4 x 1024 ( 1080p )screens
Al very useable and no worry about aligning them etc.
Not sure why 1440p is forgotten. I think it is an ideal middle.
It does not need nearly as much processing power from the PC. The monitor can be cheaper and the result is fantastic and, I would argue, not discernible by most people.
Hmm. Helpful to know that the pixel refresh can be postponed, though, thanks!
