OLED vs QLED discussion

[Unclescar]

Nearly every where I look, OLED is being praised, and QLED is being ridiculed.
I had no experience with either, but am very excited for the new Acer/Asus x35 ultrawides, both of which are QLED, and my first thought was "bummer, too bad they aren't OLED"
but.. why did I have that thought? I was just unintentionally following mob mentality on subjective thoughts where if you don't agree that OLED is superior then you are wrong, and that seemed silly.

While my wife and I were running errands today, we stopped by Best Buy, and I stood in front of their TV's for probably half an hour or so.
They had two 65" displays, side by side, running the same video clip. One was LG's OLED, the other Samsung's QLED, all other features were pretty much identical.

I cannot say how well they were calibrated but on their own they were absolutely gorgeous, and it was pretty easy to spot a poorly calibrated TV from the rest. These two both looked good.

I'm going to disagree with the mob mentality here now that I've seen them side by side.
The OLED has objectively blacker blacks because the pixel can be completely off, but in a room that isn't very dark, it's not noticeable. The QLED's blacks were just as deep and dark as far as I could tell.
As for color, my observation was the the vibrancy on the QLED was better. not by much, but the colors seemed to be more rich and deep. The OLED, while much richer than some of the other TVs, did not look quite as rich as the QLED.
Sure OLED is new, but new doesn't ALWAYS mean better than something that is refined.. so I guess we'll see the next generation of stuff after OLED has been refined a few times on the consumer market.

So basically, when you compare side by side a QLED and an OLED that have identical specs otherwise, my opinion (admittedly based on minimal experience) is that the QLED actually comes out on top, barely, but anyone would be absolutely thrilled with either and should care far more about price than which display tech it uses.
I no longer have slight disappointment in the type of display on these upcoming x35 ultrawides.


So what do YOU guys think about the two techs?

[Techicolors]

3 minutes ago, Unclescar said:

The OLED has objectively blacker blacks because the pixel can be completely off, but in a room that isn't very dark, it's not noticeable. The QLED's blacks were just as deep and dark as far as I could tell.

OLED is more favorable when you put it in a dark room. 

 

5 minutes ago, Unclescar said:

I had no experience with either, but am very excited for the new Acer/Asus x35 ultrawides, both of which are QLED, and my first thought was "bummer, too bad they aren't OLED"

the Dell OLED monitor costs $3500, so it's kinda of a good thing they went with QLED film technology for those displays. besides, LG OLEDs work very well for gaming 

 

7 minutes ago, Unclescar said:

I cannot say how well they were calibrated but on their own they were absolutely gorgeous, and it was pretty easy to spot a poorly calibrated TV from the rest. These two both looked good

the average viewer doesn't know what kinds of settings they have to set for the display demo TVs. for all we know it may be way off an accurate calibration

[Oshino Shinobu]

Neither is definitely better than the other. Having only seen the two side by side in showrooms, it's difficult to give a real comparison between the two as I had no control over the lighting conditions, TV configuration or the content being played.

 

From what I have seen, OLED looks better, though like I said, that's based on seeing them in way less than ideal conditions. 

[Sakkura]

There are pros and cons to each, and both techs are constantly evolving. So I don't think you can just generally say one is better than the other.

[Techicolors]

i forgot to mention this, but the biggest drawback with OLED (for OLED TVs anyways) is that they cannot get as bright as Samsung's QLED sets. i believe the brightest OLED TVs can go up to 600-700 nits at peak window. and lots of OLED sets employ an automatic brightness limiter that can reduce brightness slowly over time.

anyways, this is mostly detrimental to HDR viewing, and honestly it's not that huge of a deal. as OLED's promise of infinite contrast ratio make up for lower peak brightness. and plus the way brightness drops off seems reasonable. but i have heard cases of some LG OLEDs having sudden brightness limiting than usual 

[Glenwing]

QLED as it stands now is a type of LCD backlight, which means it only really affects color gamut. Black levels are dependent on the panel type, it doesn't really have anything to do with the QLEDs themselves. I suppose the backlight arrangement can affect black levels / contrast too (i.e. local dimming) but again it wouldn't provide anything different than doing the same thing with standard WLED backlights. Black levels don't have anything to do with being QLED-backlit. So a TV with a QLED backlight may or may not have decent black levels, being QLED doesn't tell you anything about that. If a TV has good black levels, it could have also been done without using a QLED backlight.

 

Since it is another variation of LCD tech, it still suffers from all the other limitations of LCDs, namely limited response time and refresh rate, as well as color shift (for TN, and VA LCDs to some extent) or IPS glow, depending on the panel type used, as well as the possibility of backlight bleed. OLED is more scalable to the future in these regards. On the upside, QLED-backlit LCDs also inherit a very mature manufacturing process which has already been scaled to high production and so should be relatively low cost, though companies may charge a premium anyway of course.

 

The only thing really different from past LCD variations is wider color gamut and better power efficiency. Other than that QLED backlights don't change anything else from previous LCD displays.

[Foxxer]

Manufacturers still taking their time, just like 1440 60hz IPS took forever to upgrade.

OLED will solve many of them overpriced monitors BLB issues.

[AmpMC]

Here's a statement from Samsung,

 

"QLED stands for Quantum Dot LED TV. There are and will be many different types of quantum dot based display technologies today. Some new architectures are likely to arise in the future as well. QLED encompasses all of these variations of architecture just as the term OLED encompasses a variety of different architectures. Using your example of OLED, OLEDs can utilize passive or active backplanes and emissive layers that are composed of white emitters with RGB or RGBW filters, or with direct RGB emitting materials and no color filters. Yet these are all classified as 'OLED' displays."

 

To me, this means it's more or less just their version of the current technology going on right now. Organic LED is the newest thing on the market, and Samsung has their own.

[Glenwing]

2 minutes ago, AmpMC said:

To me, this means it's more or less just their version of the current technology going on right now. Organic LED is the newest thing on the market, and Samsung has their own.

Quantum dots aren't a type of organic LED though, they're completely different things.

[dizmo]

Don't OLED panels suffer from burn in more so than even an LCD?

The issue with this argument is it's pretty subjective, as with most things that are seen by the human eye. Not everyone sees things the same.

[AmpMC]

2 minutes ago, Glenwing said:

Quantum dots aren't a type of organic LED though, they're completely different things.

Ahh yes, I guess reading it back it sounds like I'm comparing apples to apples by saying "Samsung has their own", but I mean't they have their own technology different from OLED.

[Techicolors]

45 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Don't OLED panels suffer from burn in more so than even an LCD?

The issue with this argument is it's pretty subjective, as with most things that are seen by the human eye. Not everyone sees things the same.

i'm not sure if i ever heard of cases of LCDs burning in. at least for QLED-based LCD

 

burn-in for OLED was a huge problem a few years back, but it has gotten significantly better. though it's still a cause for concern for buying OLED TVs. i know for LG OLEDs, they have several measures to counteract image retention (screensaver, power savings, etc). so burn-in is ruled out to those who actually buy LG OLED.