No Stupid Questions

We fell asleep with the Diablo 3 inventory screen open on our OLED and now it's permanently burned in. Thankfully it is only noticable against yellow backgrounds. Other than that drawback, OLED screens are amazing. We have a 4k LCD screen in another room and it looks like trash compared to the OLED.

Vincent is a gem

Have you seen them side by side? The difference between backlit LCD and OLED is massive. It's a much greater jump in quality than going from 4k to 8k (which IMHO is barely noticable)

For personal use I buy Visio displays, and have had nothing but success.

I have some smaller, older Vizio TV's that were great, no issues. I recently bought 3 large, expensive Vizio TV's and had problems with all 3. All issues dealing with updates. Had 70" get stuck in an update cycle, no fix, even customer service couldn't help. Other 2 repeatedly will not turn on after an update. Problem persists occasionally, but usually resolves in 5-10 minutes.

Done with Vizio. Sony if I want to spend a lot, Samsung if I want to spend a little less.

Quantum dot LED TVs don't actually use quantum dot LEDs (yay, marketing). They're built like any other LCD, but instead of having a white backlight (typically a blue LED with a phosphor to fluoresce the blue to green and red, too, making white) and then a colour filter behind each pixel subelement to only let the right colour through, they have a blue LED backlight, and then a quantum dot film that fluoresces the blue to the right colour.

The advantage of this is that you're not making light in colours you can't use just to get absorbed by the filter and turned into heat, so can make the backlight brighter, which, when combined with other techniques to make good LCDs, is enough to make them comparable to OLEDs in quality and price.

Actual quantum dot LEDs let you make light at practically any frequency you want, like OLEDs (traditional LEDs only make light at bandgap frequencies for atoms of elements, and there's not a huge choice of suitable elements, hence blue LEDs taking decades to materialise after other colours were cheap). In theory, quantum dot LEDs won't have burn-in problems, but they're currently not practical to make a TV out of, giving marketing people plenty of time to weasel out of their fuckup with naming existing QLED TVs.

And OLED is dimming at the pixel layer?

One thing to keep in mind is if you’re watching old DVD’s, pay for low-tier Netflix, or have low quality pirated content, the difference will be way less noticeable.

Blurays look 🔥

I won't buy an internet ready TV. My newest screen is a hospitality screen from Samsung. It's designed to be hardwired to a network and so doesn't have any bloatware or telemetrics.

Gradation, color reproduction, and gaming performance are also important factors. There are a lot of “mid tier” TVs (and even some of the “premium” TVs) that can produce really dark blacks, bright whites, and vivid colors, but…

• Gradation: Mid tier and above non-OLED TVs have local dimming and other features to improve blacks and contrast. They tend to have dark blacks and very bright whites, but their performance in between is important too. You will find that many of these tvs are hard to impossible to calibrate to get even gradation between black and white. This leads to muddy grays and “crushed” blacks and whites. Crushed blacks means that very dark gray appears black so you lose detail. Crushed whites means the same on the white end. Additionally, local dimming can lead to “halo” effects in which when there is a quick transition from black to lighter colors, the black area has a halo around it.

• Color: In my experience, the colors are often off. Youll get really vivid colors in certain tones and more muted colors in others. This can lead to a picture seeming to have a tint to it. Skin tones, which we tend to be more sensitive to, may appear greenish. These TVs will often have a “feature” to improve skin tones because manufacturers know that people notice that. This feature will try to correct green (or other tint) but tends to also influence reproduction of other colors.

• Gaming: many TVs have a “game mode” which reduces input lag to make gaming better. Input lag is the amount of time it takes for a video signal coming into the tv to be displayed on the screen. With gaming mode off, many TVs have input lag that is 70-100ms (100ms is 1/10 of a second). This amount of lag is very noticeable in any game that requires fast reactions. Gaming mode input lag tends to be great these days - often 10ms or less… but on a lot of TVs it comes with a big price: many of the TVs picture processing features get turned off. This can include local dimming, which means you end up with gray blacks and a muddy picture in gaming mode.

I purchased and returned three higher end tvs ($900 to $1200 for a 65” tv) from about 2019 to 2021 in an attempt to replace a 55” plasma TV from 2013. Despite the fact that the plasma was 1080p and had no HDR capability, the picture was way better than any LCD-based variety I looked at (note: LED, QLED, and MicroLED are all LCD tech). All of them were bad enough in one or more of the above areas for me to return them. Most notably, I game on tv and that is where the failures of these TVs really really showed. Finally, about two years ago, I dropped the $$ for an OLED (LG C2). This was a true upgrade and I am really happy with the picture and performance. Not to say there aren’t software issues, but it felt like a real upgrade.

OLED is a massive upgrade. Each pixel is its own backlight instead of having an array of leds. So you get actual black, because there is no light there. The contrast and color is amazing.

But OLED is the new plasma. They don’t have burn in anymore, but if you don’t have it in a very dark room, the glare will make you go insane.

I sure do, although OLEDs pretty much have an infinite black level, and the color range is unparalleled to LCDs.

I might be speaking as a old ignorant fool, but I feel like much of the features in the past 20 years of tvs were just marketing. Or maybe I'm no longer that interested in how many vibrant colors or frames a TV can do. I may go "wow" for the first ten minutes, but then it just fades into the background.

Like getting excited over a toaster.

My primary concern buying a TV would be UX. If the menu system is well thought out and they're not spamming the user with advertising, it's probably a good indicator that they're investing in good hardware too.

Not that I wouldn't totally geek out for weeks watching reviews and learning all the minutiae of light levels and color accuracy before pulling the trigger. The research is half the fun.