OLED Monitors

[vinchansoe]

Hope this isn't a stupid question, but what happened to OLED monitors? I'd buy an oled over a 4K at less than 30" yet prices on oled still haven't changed all that much over the past few years

[nj4ck]

There are technical difficulties in building OLED panels in sizes suitable for desktop/TV use. I don't remember exactly what the issue is, but I think it was related to delivering power to each of the OLEDs over longer distances than just a few inches. Once somebody fixes that issue, we should be seing 23"+ OLED panels at affordable prices, I guess within the next 2-3 years.

[Hyp0xia]

There are technical difficulties in building OLED panels in sizes suitable for desktop/TV use. I don't remember exactly what the issue is, but I think it was related to delivering power to each of the OLEDs over longer distances than just a few inches. Once somebody fixes that issue, we should be seing 23"+ OLED panels at affordable prices, I guess within the next 2-3 years.

My mother has a 55" OLED television set in her living room. It makes one wonder why we can't have a 21"-34" OLED monitor.

[Geekazoid]

If we had OLED monitors all those backlight leakage problems would be solved.

[vinchansoe]

And why haven't they really come down in price? why aren't there more of them? I'm really hoping that after the 4K hype monitor technology will start to improve in places where it really matters.

[Tacitus]

I saw a curved OLED TV at Costco a couple of weeks ago. My god it was beautiful... and at £2900 also very expensive.

[nj4ck]

My mother has a 55" OLED television set in her living room. It makes one wonder why we can't have a 21"-34" OLED monitor.

that's an $8000 TV. Your monitor would be priced similarly.

[Hyp0xia]

that's an $8000 TV. Your monitor would be priced similarly.

Actually, it retails for $6,000, though I got it for her for $1,700 due to a special deal LG did for retail employees at a certain store. I think that price illustrates the amount of margin they're actually making on OLED right now.

[Glenwing]

There are still issues to be resolved with the technology. Longevity is one concern, because OLEDs degrade in brightness over time, particularly the blue OLEDs. The on-time to 80% brightness isn't too much less than LCD backlights, but the problem is that each OLED degrades individually depending on how much that pixel is used, whereas in LCDs the entire backlight degrades together, so it's just a brightness decrease. With OLEDs, for example if you just watch a ton of wide aspect movies where there are black bars on the top and bottom, those pixels won't be degrading while the rest are. The color balance and uniformity gets messed up after a lot of use, and it's not just a matter of calibrating the color balance to fix it, because every individual pixel will have degraded a different amount.

Basically, you can make a working prototype to display at CES but they aren't quite ready for long-term heavy use, so people will be slow to bring them out until this is better. Plus they have to figure out the color calibration so the saturation isn't such a large jump compared to LCDs.

There are manufacturing methods to print OLEDs with inkjet style things, which is relatively cheap, easy, and gives high yields. However, coming up with a concept and building a prototype are still a far cry from these methods being implemented in facilities for mass production.

Given a few more years of development to iron out the problems, hopefully manufacturers will start putting some serious weight towards bringing OLED to mass production.