OLED panels are seriously stunning and the technology is one of the few that I really, really hope becomes increasingly attainable for more PC gamers. But there are still flaws with OLED monitors (and no, I'm not talking about the problem of astronomical pricing). There's the potential risk of burn-in and, more to the point, they can't get as bright as other panels can.
This is primarily because of a problem with blue OLED lighting at the sub-pixel level, and it's a problem that LG is now seemingly ready to start fixing. The company says it has "become the world's first company to successfully verify the commercialization-level performance of blue phosphorescent OLED panels on a mass production line."
You might have heard about blue phosphorescent OLED panels before—what LG points out is called the "Dream OLED"—because we first heard word of this tech last year.
The problem is that, previously, blue OLEDs had to be fluorescent rather than phosphorescent due, as LG explains, to it "having the shortest wavelength and demanding the greatest energy"—i.e. more energy is required to make a phosphorescent OLED emit blue than for a fluorescent OLED to produce the same light.
However, fluorescent lighting consumes more power because it requires constant energy, as there's no afterglow, and this means they also produce more heat. To reduce the risk of burn-in, fluorescent OLEDs are forced to run with a lower brightness. Blue is, therefore, somewhat of a bottleneck to OLED screens in general.
Original OLED panels used separate red, green, and blue OLEDs for each pixel, but this caused big problems with burn-in over time. The alternative that LG found with WOLED was to use white OLEDs exclusively for each pixel and put these through colour filters, but while this improves brightness, it leads to washed-out colours.
The solution Samsung used with QD-OLED was to use blue OLEDs and then have this light go through a quantum dot layer to convert to red or green, but apart from the subpixel layout causing problems such as text fringing, the fact that the blue OLEDs must be fluorescent means it doesn't allow for as much brightness.
Essentially, there has been no perfect solution to the problem because phosphorescent blue hasn't been an option. Until now, according to LG, that is, thanks to its new "Dream OLED" tech, which uses a stacked mix of phosphorescent and fluorescent blue OLED—a "Hybrid Tandem" approach—which is claimed to consume 15% less power than traditional OLED.
We shouldn't expect PC gaming monitors to come with such tech for a while, though. The first such panels LG is displaying are applied to smartphones and tablets. But the company does say: "As more and more products require high definition and high efficiency, such as AI PCs and AR/VR devices, the application of blue phosphorescence technology is expected to expand rapidly."
If and when such tech does come to PC, we can bet some of the best gaming monitors will be adorned with it. It will hopefully allow for much brighter OLED panels that are more power-efficient and have all the colour accuracy and vibrancy of QD-OLED rather than WOLED. That's the hope, anyway.
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