6 ms·

For the last 10 years or so, whenever I wander around a store and see all the latest stereos and TVs, I'm never very impressed by anything. TVs got thinner and

For the last 10 years or so, whenever I wander around a store and see all the latest stereos and TVs, I'm never very impressed by anything. TVs got thinner and flatter, and then they were curved, which I just think is just a gimmick. But recently I saw a 4K OLED TV from Samsung, and it stopped me in my tracks. Actually on two different occasions. I've never seen colors or pure black like that, and the clarity is just stunning. Anyway, this is just the first time I've ever felt the desire to save up and buy a new TV. It would be nice if Apple started using OLED displays in iPhones, but I don't care so much about that. My iPhone 6S screen looks fine to me, and I don't feel any need to upgrade.

davnn 10y ago
> It would be nice if Apple started using OLED displays in iPhones, but I don't care so much about that. My iPhone 6S screen looks fine to me, and I don't feel any need to upgrade. It's a shame. My iPhones still feel like a downgrade from my years old Note 3 (display-wise).
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
  One of the reasons I'm hanging on to a Lumia that barely got past a 2 digit price. (Microsoft quit giving things away to consumers, is now pulling harder on enterprise teats.)
- runeks 10y ago
  I've only tried the OLED display on a Samsung Galaxy S3, and while the colors were nice it was almost unusable in direct sunlight, due to the low brightness of the display. I was happy to upgrade to an iPhone 6, and regain the ability to use my phone in the sun.
  - andoon 10y ago
    Not only that, but OLED screens have perceptible low response times and burn-in (my old S3 screen has the Candy Crush UI burned in, and is also yellowish because blue LEDs burn in faster than green/red ones). That said I suppose newer OLED screens do not have as many problems, but for a long time OLED screens were inferior to LCD screens, and were used only because they were capable of higher contrast ratios which made them much more appealing to the eye.
    - dep_b 10y ago
      Perhaps it's typical for the sell and forget mentality of many Android manufacturers that phones are made to look as appealing as possible when in a display next to other phones but once the sale is over the love is usually gone. So a display that is super colorful in the beginning and yellow after a few months apparently for some manufacturers is no problem at all. Lots of expensive looking big midrange phones suffer from this when I see people using phones in bars or public transport.
  - renox 10y ago
    I had a GS3 and hated that I couldn't use it in the sun, but my GS7 is usable in the sun.
- canes123456 10y ago
  If you don't switch the note 3 to movie mode the color are super saturated. It is not accurate at all but maybe that is what you like over the iPhone? Side by side the iPhone will look dull compared to the note 3.
johansch 10y ago
Samsung are not making OLED TVs. Maybe you saw an LG OLED TV?
- nathan_f77 10y ago
  Whoops, you're right! Haha the TV I was looking at wasn't even an OLED TV. I think it was this one: http://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/4k-suhd-tvs/65-class-ks9000-9-series-4k-suhd-tv-2016-model-un65ks9000fxza/ http://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/4k-su... I guess that's just a regular LCD, but whatever they're doing, it looks amazing. P.S. I also looked at the LG OLED TVs, but the picture didn't look as nice. Of course, it was probably just the demo video.
  - joncrocks 10y ago
    The high-end LCDs can go very bright nowadays, and HDR content means that there can be a great contrast between the bright parts and dark parts of an image. The Samsung you point at is one of the best of last years TVs, so yes, a very good picture. Only downside is that it is edge-lit, meaning that the brightness of light objects can bleed into the surrounding areas. Where OLED shines though is the low-end, the blacks/dark scenes, where you can go very dark right next to very light. source: I'm looking for a new TV, so of course have to do extensive research...
    - andy_ppp 10y ago
      What are your favourite options right now?
      - martinald 10y ago
        I've had my eye on the LG OLED55B6V for months now. I actually bought it when it hit £1500 in the UK but was cancelled because they ran out of stock. A few months later and it's now at £1750, probably because they've refixed GBP/USD on it after the brexit disaster. If it gets down to £1500 I'm gonna pick it up. I watch a lot of dark content and the OLED is amazing at showing it properly.
rb808 10y ago
I bought an LG OLED TV last black Friday. Its incredible. I rarely watched TV but this winter I found lots of excuses to watch as much as possible. Special mention to Amazon's the Grand Tour. Available in 4k HDR some segments have the best quality video I've ever seen - sometimes the TV just looks like a window.
- inetknght 10y ago
  I also bought a 4K OLED TV last black Friday. It's great. I played some games on it and it was amazing. One thing that was off-putting: I'd noticed that the picture isn't perfectly square. Indeed, it seems that the TV warps the picture over time until you go through the one-hour-cleanup-thing in the settings. It's basically like oldschool degaussing, I gather. But the color reproduction and contrast is amazing. My old 23" LCD TF panels just don't hold a candle.
  - mstade 10y ago
    I'm considering getting one of those LG 65" OLED TVs, after seeing one in-store and being completely blown away by the picture quality. Much like the GP I can't recall the last time I saw a display that actually wowed me, but watching a space shuttle take off, and bright stars as dots against a pitch black sky without the typical blue-ish backlight bleed, was just amazing. I stood there watching the same 4-5 minute video loop for what must have been half an hour or so. But your comment now gives me pause – the picture warps over time? Do you have any sources on this so I can learn more?
  - Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y ago
    Certainly it's nothing like degaussing; it's a panel of individually addressable OLEDs that do not move, not a vacuum tube. My guess is that this is an artifact of some sort of 'motion control' or other processing the TV applies.
mtgx 10y ago
Yeah, looking forward to OLED TVs and monitors that use the BT.2100 color space standard (BT.2020 + HDR). http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1467719709 http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1...
conception 10y ago
It'd be a nice upgrade for the phone as it'd help battery life, especially with night mode.
rebootthesystem 10y ago
The big issue with OLED's is differential aging of subpixels across space and time. In other words, red, green and blue subpixels "wear out" at different rates over time as well as over the surface of the display. This means that as time goes by you could have one corner of the display develop a green tint while the other corner goes red. This might very well be one of those technologies that has all the makings of the greatest improvement in the field yet never gets there because of one nagging issue.
- slededit 10y ago
  It seems fairly trivial to keep a lifetime count of the on-time for individual pixels (or even just subregions) and adjust the tint based upon that. This could be fairly easily solved, although doing this in real time at 4K would require custom silicon.
  - rebootthesystem 10y ago
    As with everything that should be trivial this becomes fairly non-trivial upon contact with reality. At the most fundamental level you need three lookup tables with one entry per sub-pixel. On a 1920 x 1080 display that means a little over two million entries for each, R, G and B. In other words, six million entries. Pixel period at 60Hz is going to be in the sub-10 ns range. This means you would need lookup table memory that can be randomly indexed and respond within less than 10 ns in order to be able to grab a correction value for each and every subpixel being displayed. Due to latency and other realities of DDR SDRAM this is impossible. DDR SDRAM does far better for burst access of sequential blocks of data within a row. It does not do well for fully random access of single memory locations. DDR4 can't do full random single location access at these data rates. Wikipedia article on SDRAM basics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_dynamic_random-access_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_dynamic_random-acc... Other memory technologies (QDR SRAM and RLD RAM) do exist that can accomplish the above requirement. They are extremely expensive and so they are not commonly seen in products such as televisions. Yes, custom chips or an FPGA would be required in order to manage the process. Even then, the problem isn't resolved. The next issue is one of differential quantization. Each subpixel is either going to be driven by an 8 or 10 bit data stream. I'll use 8 bits for this example. Say a blue sub-pixel is 25% "worn out". Assuming a linear transfer function (it isn't) this means that in order for all other blue sub-pixels on the entire screen need to be limited to a max of 75% output in order to not be brighter than that one blue sub-pixel. Yet, the problem doesn't end there. We also need to knock down all red and green pixels to limit them to a maximum of 75% output. Why? Because, in order to make white light you now have to compensate all color channels, otherwise you'd have too much red and green against a weak blue output. It very quickly becomes a lowest common denominator problem. Going back to quantization. When we started with a fresh OLED display we had 256 levels from black to white. Now we are down to 192 due to the necessary compensation. But, that's not all! There's more! Let's say green sub-pixels on the opposite side of the screen have now "worn out" down to 60% max output. Now the entire screen needs to be brought down to this new limit. And total quantization levels are now down to 153. The practical result of losing quantization levels is image degradation due to an inability to smoothly map input to output. On first inspection this might seem to indicate that a high speed three channel lookup table isn't really necessary. If we trim the output of all pixels down to the worst case pixel, well, just adjust the entire display. Except this won't work. If you bring all pixels down to 60% you are also bringing down the bad pixels that could not produce full light output. The end results is that, yes, you do need a high speed lookup table in order to leave bad pixels alone (not quite) and adjust good pixels to match the bad pixels. And yet, we are not done with this. There's a fundamental issue that hasn't been addressed, even after throwing all that technology at it: Calibration. In order to be able to populate three lookup tables (red, green and blue) we need to be able to measure wear at the sub-pixel level. This is extremely time consuming and most definitely well outside the realm of consumers. At the factory? Sure. At home? Not likely. I can see gross measurement. For example, manually measure sixteen zones and accept the fact that the image might have visible color differences due to this. Or, maybe, use a high resolution sensor to measure a few hundred zones. And this is when, to reach for the popular saying, you start to find yourself up to your ass in alligators when all you wanted to do was drain the swamp. Funny how things work. EDIT: Forgot to add. A lifetime "on" time counter won't work. The degradation of OLED pixels isn't purely a function of time. You can end-up with pixels that have been active for exactly the same time and one is significantly brighter than the other. You have to measure.
germinalphrase 10y ago
I feel as if the picture quality of most contemporary televisions has topped out for my tastes. OLED can really look wonderful. I wish more effort was being made to have them more smoothly integrate into a livings space rather than remaining as a great, black square on the wall [0]. [0]www.dezeen.com/2017/03/14/yves-behar-design-samsung-television-look-like-frame-artwork-design-technology/
- goldenchrome 10y ago
  Check out the Serif TV by Samsung http://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/4k-uhd-tvs/40--class-serif-4k-uhd-tv--white--un40ls001afxza/ http://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/4k-uh...
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    What is special about this TV?

davnn 10y ago

> It would be nice if Apple started using OLED displays in iPhones, but I don't care so much about that. My iPhone 6S screen looks fine to me, and I don't feel any need to upgrade. It's a shame. My iPhones still feel like a downgrade from my years old Note 3 (display-wise).

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
One of the reasons I'm hanging on to a Lumia that barely got past a 2 digit price. (Microsoft quit giving things away to consumers, is now pulling harder on enterprise teats.)
runeks 10y ago
I've only tried the OLED display on a Samsung Galaxy S3, and while the colors were nice it was almost unusable in direct sunlight, due to the low brightness of the display. I was happy to upgrade to an iPhone 6, and regain the ability to use my phone in the sun.
- andoon 10y ago
  Not only that, but OLED screens have perceptible low response times and burn-in (my old S3 screen has the Candy Crush UI burned in, and is also yellowish because blue LEDs burn in faster than green/red ones). That said I suppose newer OLED screens do not have as many problems, but for a long time OLED screens were inferior to LCD screens, and were used only because they were capable of higher contrast ratios which made them much more appealing to the eye.
  - dep_b 10y ago
    Perhaps it's typical for the sell and forget mentality of many Android manufacturers that phones are made to look as appealing as possible when in a display next to other phones but once the sale is over the love is usually gone. So a display that is super colorful in the beginning and yellow after a few months apparently for some manufacturers is no problem at all. Lots of expensive looking big midrange phones suffer from this when I see people using phones in bars or public transport.
- renox 10y ago
  I had a GS3 and hated that I couldn't use it in the sun, but my GS7 is usable in the sun.
canes123456 10y ago
If you don't switch the note 3 to movie mode the color are super saturated. It is not accurate at all but maybe that is what you like over the iPhone? Side by side the iPhone will look dull compared to the note 3.

johansch 10y ago

Samsung are not making OLED TVs. Maybe you saw an LG OLED TV?

nathan_f77 10y ago
Whoops, you're right! Haha the TV I was looking at wasn't even an OLED TV. I think it was this one: http://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/4k-suhd-tvs/65-class-ks9000-9-series-4k-suhd-tv-2016-model-un65ks9000fxza/ http://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/4k-su... I guess that's just a regular LCD, but whatever they're doing, it looks amazing. P.S. I also looked at the LG OLED TVs, but the picture didn't look as nice. Of course, it was probably just the demo video.
- joncrocks 10y ago
  The high-end LCDs can go very bright nowadays, and HDR content means that there can be a great contrast between the bright parts and dark parts of an image. The Samsung you point at is one of the best of last years TVs, so yes, a very good picture. Only downside is that it is edge-lit, meaning that the brightness of light objects can bleed into the surrounding areas. Where OLED shines though is the low-end, the blacks/dark scenes, where you can go very dark right next to very light. source: I'm looking for a new TV, so of course have to do extensive research...
  - andy_ppp 10y ago
    What are your favourite options right now?
    - martinald 10y ago
      I've had my eye on the LG OLED55B6V for months now. I actually bought it when it hit £1500 in the UK but was cancelled because they ran out of stock. A few months later and it's now at £1750, probably because they've refixed GBP/USD on it after the brexit disaster. If it gets down to £1500 I'm gonna pick it up. I watch a lot of dark content and the OLED is amazing at showing it properly.

rb808 10y ago

I bought an LG OLED TV last black Friday. Its incredible. I rarely watched TV but this winter I found lots of excuses to watch as much as possible. Special mention to Amazon's the Grand Tour. Available in 4k HDR some segments have the best quality video I've ever seen - sometimes the TV just looks like a window.

inetknght 10y ago
I also bought a 4K OLED TV last black Friday. It's great. I played some games on it and it was amazing. One thing that was off-putting: I'd noticed that the picture isn't perfectly square. Indeed, it seems that the TV warps the picture over time until you go through the one-hour-cleanup-thing in the settings. It's basically like oldschool degaussing, I gather. But the color reproduction and contrast is amazing. My old 23" LCD TF panels just don't hold a candle.
- mstade 10y ago
  I'm considering getting one of those LG 65" OLED TVs, after seeing one in-store and being completely blown away by the picture quality. Much like the GP I can't recall the last time I saw a display that actually wowed me, but watching a space shuttle take off, and bright stars as dots against a pitch black sky without the typical blue-ish backlight bleed, was just amazing. I stood there watching the same 4-5 minute video loop for what must have been half an hour or so. But your comment now gives me pause – the picture warps over time? Do you have any sources on this so I can learn more?
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y ago
  Certainly it's nothing like degaussing; it's a panel of individually addressable OLEDs that do not move, not a vacuum tube. My guess is that this is an artifact of some sort of 'motion control' or other processing the TV applies.

mtgx 10y ago

Yeah, looking forward to OLED TVs and monitors that use the BT.2100 color space standard (BT.2020 + HDR). http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1467719709 http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1...

conception 10y ago

It'd be a nice upgrade for the phone as it'd help battery life, especially with night mode.

rebootthesystem 10y ago

The big issue with OLED's is differential aging of subpixels across space and time. In other words, red, green and blue subpixels "wear out" at different rates over time as well as over the surface of the display. This means that as time goes by you could have one corner of the display develop a green tint while the other corner goes red. This might very well be one of those technologies that has all the makings of the greatest improvement in the field yet never gets there because of one nagging issue.

slededit 10y ago
It seems fairly trivial to keep a lifetime count of the on-time for individual pixels (or even just subregions) and adjust the tint based upon that. This could be fairly easily solved, although doing this in real time at 4K would require custom silicon.
- rebootthesystem 10y ago
  As with everything that should be trivial this becomes fairly non-trivial upon contact with reality. At the most fundamental level you need three lookup tables with one entry per sub-pixel. On a 1920 x 1080 display that means a little over two million entries for each, R, G and B. In other words, six million entries. Pixel period at 60Hz is going to be in the sub-10 ns range. This means you would need lookup table memory that can be randomly indexed and respond within less than 10 ns in order to be able to grab a correction value for each and every subpixel being displayed. Due to latency and other realities of DDR SDRAM this is impossible. DDR SDRAM does far better for burst access of sequential blocks of data within a row. It does not do well for fully random access of single memory locations. DDR4 can't do full random single location access at these data rates. Wikipedia article on SDRAM basics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_dynamic_random-access_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_dynamic_random-acc... Other memory technologies (QDR SRAM and RLD RAM) do exist that can accomplish the above requirement. They are extremely expensive and so they are not commonly seen in products such as televisions. Yes, custom chips or an FPGA would be required in order to manage the process. Even then, the problem isn't resolved. The next issue is one of differential quantization. Each subpixel is either going to be driven by an 8 or 10 bit data stream. I'll use 8 bits for this example. Say a blue sub-pixel is 25% "worn out". Assuming a linear transfer function (it isn't) this means that in order for all other blue sub-pixels on the entire screen need to be limited to a max of 75% output in order to not be brighter than that one blue sub-pixel. Yet, the problem doesn't end there. We also need to knock down all red and green pixels to limit them to a maximum of 75% output. Why? Because, in order to make white light you now have to compensate all color channels, otherwise you'd have too much red and green against a weak blue output. It very quickly becomes a lowest common denominator problem. Going back to quantization. When we started with a fresh OLED display we had 256 levels from black to white. Now we are down to 192 due to the necessary compensation. But, that's not all! There's more! Let's say green sub-pixels on the opposite side of the screen have now "worn out" down to 60% max output. Now the entire screen needs to be brought down to this new limit. And total quantization levels are now down to 153. The practical result of losing quantization levels is image degradation due to an inability to smoothly map input to output. On first inspection this might seem to indicate that a high speed three channel lookup table isn't really necessary. If we trim the output of all pixels down to the worst case pixel, well, just adjust the entire display. Except this won't work. If you bring all pixels down to 60% you are also bringing down the bad pixels that could not produce full light output. The end results is that, yes, you do need a high speed lookup table in order to leave bad pixels alone (not quite) and adjust good pixels to match the bad pixels. And yet, we are not done with this. There's a fundamental issue that hasn't been addressed, even after throwing all that technology at it: Calibration. In order to be able to populate three lookup tables (red, green and blue) we need to be able to measure wear at the sub-pixel level. This is extremely time consuming and most definitely well outside the realm of consumers. At the factory? Sure. At home? Not likely. I can see gross measurement. For example, manually measure sixteen zones and accept the fact that the image might have visible color differences due to this. Or, maybe, use a high resolution sensor to measure a few hundred zones. And this is when, to reach for the popular saying, you start to find yourself up to your ass in alligators when all you wanted to do was drain the swamp. Funny how things work. EDIT: Forgot to add. A lifetime "on" time counter won't work. The degradation of OLED pixels isn't purely a function of time. You can end-up with pixels that have been active for exactly the same time and one is significantly brighter than the other. You have to measure.

germinalphrase 10y ago

I feel as if the picture quality of most contemporary televisions has topped out for my tastes. OLED can really look wonderful. I wish more effort was being made to have them more smoothly integrate into a livings space rather than remaining as a great, black square on the wall [0]. [0]www.dezeen.com/2017/03/14/yves-behar-design-samsung-television-look-like-frame-artwork-design-technology/

goldenchrome 10y ago
Check out the Serif TV by Samsung http://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/4k-uhd-tvs/40--class-serif-4k-uhd-tv--white--un40ls001afxza/ http://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/4k-uh...
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  What is special about this TV?