OLED FAQ: quick questions answered
· Is OLED better than LED? Well, they're different. OLED excels in some areas, such as contrast, color accuracy, and black levels – though the low brightness might rub you the wrong way.
· Is OLED better than 4K? OLED TVs tend to have a crisp 4K resolution, but most 4K TVs don't have OLED panels. Pick and choose as you like!
· Is OLED better for my eyes? OLED panels emit around half the amount of blue light than equivalent LCD sets, which should reduce the likelihood of damage to your eyes and stop the evening's programming keeping you up at night. You should get those benefits for OLED smartphones too.
· Why is OLED so expensive? They're expensive and difficult to produce, with a lot of models suffering breakages while on the factory line. (Only the working ones make it to retail, of course.)
· What's the lifespan of an OLED TV? Any OLED TV should last you years of use. Back in 2016 The Korea Times reported that LG OLED TVs had a lifespan of over 100,000 hours (11 years of constant use).
· Should I worry about OLED burn-in? Probably not. Image retention isn't a widespread problem, and you're unlikely to be affected – though we have more information on this below.
OLED explained
What is OLED, and how is it different?
OLED stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode, with "organic" referring to the carbon film that sits inside the panel before the glass screen.
OLED panels emit their own light when an electric current is passed through, whereas cells in a LCD-LED display require an external light source, like a giant backlight, for brightness.
This backlight is what separated LCD screens from their LED variants. A traditional LCD screen has a backlight (called a cold-cathode fluorescent light, or CCFL) which is uniform across the entire back of the screen.
This means that whether the image is black or white, it is being lit by exactly the same brightness across the panel. This reduces what we call "hotspots," or areas of super bright light, because the actual light source illuminating them is uniform.
This all started a few years back when engineers at companies like Samsung and Sony introduced an array of LEDs as a backlight, which meant that if a certain part of the screen was black then those LEDs behind that portion could be turned off to make it appear blacker.
This is a better solution than a CCFL backlight, but it still has its problems. Since it's a light behind the LCD producing the illumination rather than the LCD layer itself, the illumination is not entirely in-sync with the pixel in front of it. The result is an effect called 'blooming', whereby LED light from bright portions of the image bleeds over into areas of blackness.
This is what separates OLEDs from LCD/LED displays. In an OLED TV display, the pixels themselves are the things producing the light, and so when they need to be black they are able to turn off completely, rather than relying on a backlight to turn off on their behalf.