This guy is complaining about fringing...on 9- and 10-pixel high fonts. That works out to 1.6mm or 1.8mm high characters on a 140 dpi screen, or about 1/16 of an inch.
He's also got Cleartype on and set to RGB stripe even though the OLED is not RGB stripe (though to be fair, Windows doesn't really make it clear what each page of the ClearType tuner does).
But yeah, if you use a _tiny_ font and sit _really_ close to the screen, you see fringing. In practice for me, it's been unnoticeable.
My Friend on a 30Hz Phone Screen because of battery saving mode said the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz is so minor, that in "In practice, it's been unnoticeable."
At one point in time 95%+ of HN comments were cheering on about Atom the text editor and later VSCode as being fast enough or unnoticeable. When Sublime user are baffled as to why. And Sublime isn't the fastest text editor either before Zed came out.
Yes, 10 times out of 10 I could tell an OLED font rendering to LCD. I wish I couldn't. Some people call it taste, some call it absurd requirement.
I could go on and on. The point is most people aren't very picky and picky is a definition defined by average. But there are those of us who have, let say very high standards that cares about PPI, Refresh Rate, Colour accuracy etc. Keyboard Key's typing distance, trackpad responsiveness, all the tiny details that I wish I could unseen and un-feel.
As the article state, RGB OLED Tandem is coming out, and I cant wait to see it in person. I have been pro LCD on Laptop for so long that when I learned Apple will soon ditch LCD for OLED I was worried. Hopefully the new sub pixel layout will fix it.
Yes this. I don't use screens below 200dpi anymore (right now I have 4K on 24", at 200% scaling) and many people say that it's a waste because it's way too high. But I can still see pixels that are off. I just love sharp text. Which everyone is used to on their phones, I don't understand why people don't want the same on their computer which they probably use a lot more hours per day (I sure do)
I'm sure I would notice and be annoyed by this fringing too unless the pixels were so small I really couldn't see them. Probably needs to be slightly higher than 200 then. But I haven't seen oled monitors with such high DPIs. The highest I've seen is 4K on 27" which wouldn't even do for me on LCD.
I have Dell P2415Q, from 2015. There are, like, 4 other (legacy) models of 24" 4K out there, and that's it. I've no idea why they don't manufacture them.
I also have one bought used. It’s the only way to have 4k and 200% scaling on Linux without everything being too big or too small. Size and ppi are perfect but sadly other aspects are becoming really dated (bad colors and contrast, high latency, low refresh rate etc).
I also have one, and it's holding up pretty well. A month or so ago I broke out my colorimeter and it had almost 100% sRGB at around 120 cd/m2. I don't recall the delta E, but it was very low.
While I didn't measure the backlight, it does seem to not go as bright as before, judging by the levels I set in the OSD. I never went above 70% or so when the sun was shining in the room (not directly on the screen, though), so it didn't have any effect on me.
I understand there are two version, I have the second one. But I don't think there's a difference in the panel itself, I think the change was related to HDMI support.
I can't comment on the latency, the only games I played on it were Civilization and Anno Something. Never had a problem for this.
I have been using P2415Qs for over 10 years by now. Replaced some, bought second hand, had to ship to Dell at one point because of the wake issues (pointless: they never really fixed them), so I know the drill. There are actually 4 versions.
The last new one I bought in 2018 I actually paid the same price for it than when I bought my first one in 2015, so it is one of those few computer accessories that significantly increased in price over its course rather than decrease.
If you cannot see the P2415Q degrading and/or being generally crap in any metric (EXCEPT DPI) when compared to even the non-IPS black Dell monitors from this decade, you are simply blind. They are early HiDPI-revival-era panels, and it shows.
Some of the newer IPS black panels are so good that it is tempting to just take the DPI hit and go 27''... albeit with care as it seems Dell has decided this last year to put some filter that further increases blurriness.
I don't pretend that I have the best vision out there, though I don't think I'm completely blind since I don't run into things. But I actually measured this display, and it's within specs. So maybe both I and my colorimeter are blind? Sure, it's not absolutely impossible, but how likely is it?
I actually have a newer "ips black" dell, an ultrasharp 3223qe and yes, it's much better.
But what I'm saying is that the old one is still good. However, I never pretended it was as good as current models. That's moving goalposts. The initial comment was about the display degrading, so comparing it to itself when new (not even other similar models from that era!). Mine only seems to have become somewhat dimmer, but not enough to matter in my day-to-day use since it's still brighter than I need.
I have the same Dell (since 2016) and love it. But eventually I transitioned last year to a 27" 4K monitor. Still almost as sharp (KDE at 175% works fine for me).
yeah, I've tried their 24" 4k monitor, was okay, but not great, so returned.
24" is the max size I can tolerate with short-sightedness, but avoid using glasses for the monitor.
Just a nitpick… it's ppi (pixels per inch). dpi is unit used in printing.
I have the same monitor and i believe over 200ppi is pointless for desk monitor unless you are very close to it. It makes sense for laptops which you have much closer but i think most people have desk monitors way way further from the eyes.
I have a dual 4k/1080p(480hz) oled monitor at home I mostly run at 1080p and 4k lcd monitors at work. I bounce between both and really don't notice much difference. I need the text zoomed on 4k anyway, so it is effectively 1080p screen area, but sharper. Growing up in Atari days I don't mind pixels and actually like them. Latency and the 480hz is more important to me than 4k pixels.
I grew up in the Atari days too but I really need the HiDPI. I run at 200% scaling too, so effectively also 1080p. But I really love not or almost not being able to see pixels.
When people ask what computer they should buy I always tell them to get any old office computer from ebay and use the rest of the money to buy a really nice monitor, and a really nice keyboard and mouse, as these are the bits you use! For most tasks that are undertaken on a computer any processor from the last 10 years coupled with 16GB of ram is more than sufficient.
If you buy a really nice monitor, which for me starts at 6K 32” - the eBay computer will no longer drive it.
What I find insane is how long companies issued 19” 1080 screens to their employees. I don’t think that was a well calculated choice given that a couple of hundred more over 5 years would have surely improved productivity by a little bit for their 50k year employees. It felt almost done out of spite to keep people in their place
I wouldn't call a 6k monitor "nice", that's way above that. I would love on of those, since I can't stand blurry text, but even for me that's way too expensive to justify. So as the sibling says, if people are looking at old used pcs on ebay, they're unlikely to drop more than a grand on the screen.
A 32" 4k screen is nice enough and a reasonable one [0] can be had for a third of that. My I don't-know-how-old desktop I saved from the bin at work sporting an i5-6500 could drive that with no issues.
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[0] Around 2020 I bought an LG something-or-other for 350 Euros for work, 32", 4k, some form of VA panel. It had pretty good colors and better contrast than the IPS monitor I use as a Sunday-photographer.
Many employees are doing text work and, until recently, operating systems and apps did a really bad job of working with Hi DPI displays. Your best bet was to target around 115 DPI on a monitor for decent text rendering without having to deal with font scaling. 19" 1080p is perfect for that. You just gave them multiple monitors if you wanted more real estate.
that's a weird start. for me the start is 4k with proper blacks & proper color calibration
> given that a couple of hundred more over 5 years would have surely improved productivity by a little bit
no company wants the bulk of it's people to improve their productivity by even a little bit. you should be productive enough, that's it.
> It felt almost done out of spite to keep people in their place
otherwise amazon and the likes would have competitors in every country. but I don't think it's out of spite.
it's the 'established' interpersonal culture between employers and employees, like in packs without natural alphas: if one beta-beta steals the show of the beta-alpha a few times too many, he's a goner. in packs with alphas the performer gets commended and a chance to compete for the top because you want your team to be lead by the currently best. hasn't been the case in our species for a long while now.
companies don't treat their employees bad out of spite, it's so they can stick to low, moderate(d) standards and cultures, ... and have an easy work life
I have a ThinkPad T420 that is sufficient for most tasks that don't involve HEVC acceleration. It's got a mobile Sandy Bridge i7, booting off of a SATA SSD.
The only thing that really needed an upgrade was the display. I ditched the crappy 1366x768 TN for a 1440p IPS and an LVDS-eDP conversion board. Looks fantastic. Runs great.
I can see the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz on phone screens, and I think it's worth the impact on battery life.
I can see the difference in speed between VSCode and editors like Sublime or Zed, however in this case I prefer the additional features at the cost of speed/smoothness.
At some point there were LCD monitors that had very noticeable to me chequerboard pattern - like with analogue TV, only half of the screen got lit up/refreshed, but with an alternating pattern rather than scan lines.
After asking the owner of said screen how he could stand that... "stand what?"
It’s not necessarily picky - it’s sometimes about physically different perception.
When DLP projectors first came out, I couldn’t watch them. I would see colors breaking in fast motion scenes and whenever I would move my head even slightly (and … we all move our head slightly often when watching a movie).
When I told other people, some of them nodded in understanding, but the vast majority thought I was making things up - for them, it was a rock solid picture.
One of my friends replied: “I can see about 300hz. Not all the time - only when I have secadic movements; but that means many fluorescents, DLPs and other light sources drive me crazy. I guess you’re also a member of crazy club”
Some people can hear 26khz. Some people can see DLPs. Some people can see the alternating pattern….
I had a (regrettable) 19" 4x3 ViewSonic display that made that problem obvious -- way back in 2008 or so.
My homework at that time revealed a couple of things:
1. Liquid crystals are individually driven by AC waveforms, not DC as one might assume. This is the nature of the beast. The frequency at which the signal alternates is not necessarily very high. Thus, sometimes, this alternating nature is visible.
2. Some displays use dithering. A given display might support just -- say -- 6 bits per subpixel. To get the full 8 or 10 or whatever number of bits that are expected as a final output, the in-between steps are approximated by switching between two values -- sometimes (again) at a fairly low frequency that is visible.
...
But anyway, that ViewSonic monitor: Most people thought it looked fine, but it drove me nuts.
There was a point in time ( may be 15+ years ago ) I said MacBook have the best laptop speakers and that was one of the reason I brought them. They are not perfect, as any people who cares about audio will tell you but considering the size of laptop they were the best I could get and decent enough.
Most of my friends, and nearly everyone on the internet was like, who buys Laptops because of speakers? They all sounded the same. Get a Dell. I think it was on either Anandtech or Tomshardware. It was certainly before Reddit Era.
Somewhere along the line, may be 2015 to 2020 Youtube reviewers have been bashing about Dell or other laptops for their crappy cost saving speakers. ( Thank You Dave2D ) And, manage to actually show it in the video how awful they were. All of a sudden "consumer" took notice and have since demanded better speakers. Laptop Speakers in the past 5 years have improved tremendously. As it turns out, people need to learn how to compare. And once they do, they cant unseen it.
But in all honesty in the past few years I really really wished I dont have the ability to tell the difference. To not have the mentality how something could be "better". To stop thinking how everything, from Food, Furniture, Tech Stack, UI, Buildings anything could be better.
Some say it is a gift, I think it is more of a curse. And it is a struggle and tiring. I then discovered my retreat for peace was to go out to nature and enjoy the creation of god.
At some point a few years ago I didn't want to get a mac with the crappy keyboard so I bought a Thinkpad, I think it was a t480s or something of that era. The speakers were so bad it was impossible to understand the dialogue while watching a movie in a decently quiet room with some city noises in the background.
I have a newer Thinkpad (T14, Ryzen 6850) and while the sound is clear it's shameful how much better my wife's Macbook Air is. I only headphones now. I can't unhear it.
I've learned to come to terms with this mentality, mainly due to time constraints. Before, I would always do an insane amount of research and benchmarking to find the absolute best in its category, even for mundane things like a coffee grinder. I would aggregate thousands of reviews and turn them into sentiment analysis, cross-referencing reviews, and so on.
Now, I take a more 80/20 approach: I clearly define my needs and shut down any thoughts about features and capabilities that I don't need right now. Frankly, after years of thinking that I might use a feature later, I realise that I never do and never recover my investment in these kinds of gadgets.
Finding a trustworthy review source is key — by trustworthy, I mean mostly in line with your own standards. However, if you can try it yourself, that's always better.
For sound on small devices with clear voice and a good dynamic range, Samsung is quite good with its high-end Galaxy Tab line.
I think it's still worth going down the rabbit hole but only when 1) You know you're gonna use the thing a lot and for a long time and 2) You have some real, objective ways (i.e. beyond the very influenceable MOS) of measuring a real, humanly perceivable difference.
This is how I became quite learned in sound reproduction (incl. acoustics and psychoacoustics) then bought Genelec loudspeakers, for example. But I don't care about finding Samsung B-dies (I think?) for my RAM.
The curse of knowledge really. Or perhaps more accurately “awareness”.
You know about things that are to others unknown unknowns. Since ignorance is bliss, it definitely feels like a curse to you, and since what one doesn’t know can hurt them, others would see as a blessing.
> 10 times out of 10 I could tell an OLED font rendering to LCD. I wish I couldn't.
I second this. I can tell, and I would never wish that ability on my worst enemy. Very glad there's a (slim, but exists) market catering to that — and that I no longer have to buy a monitor that costs as much as a small motorcycle to not be constantly infuriated at everything in my field of vision when working.
Out of curiosity can you tell the difference in font rendering on a 14 inch laptop between 1920x1200 LCD screen and a higher resolution one?
I mean during normal work in normal position not trying to look really close.
There's no Cleartype in use here, as the first paragraph says, it's macOS.
And I'm using the default font sizes because they work well for me on an LCD. The point of this post is to document my experience with trying a current-gen generally-available OLED and how it did not work out well because of the subpixel arrangement.
It's also not just an issue on text, it affects any high contrast edges, especially perfectly vertical or horizontal ones. This meant that CAD stuff, spreadsheets (the grid), and large colored sections in graphic design software looked off as well.
> He's also got Cleartype on and set to RGB stripe even though the OLED is not RGB stripe (though to be fair, Windows doesn't really make it clear what each page of the ClearType tuner does).
I doubt it's Cleartype, the close up photo of the U3223QE show all subpixels uniformly dimmed on the fringes. The post also says the monitor is attached to a Mac mini and a previous post about OpenSCAD has a screenshot with MacOS window decorations.
There is no Cleartype; this is macOS. And as mentioned I couldn't see the fringing from normal use, that only became evident with macro photos. During normal use it just looked sparkly or weird or artifacted.
And yes, the fonts are small, but that default size in VS Code or Numbers.app -- the example photos -- work well for me. And look fine on an LCD.
He's using a Mac, Apple removed support for subpixel rendering many years ago, it's not ClearType, the display shows color fringing even with grayscale antialiasing, that's what he's complaining about.
It's not like the Cleartype tuner actually does what the pages claim - you can go through and use the magnifier to choose the grayscale-only outcomes and still see Windows doing RGB stripe cleartype throughout. People literally have to install third-party tools like MacType or GDI-PlusPlus to get solid font rendering. So blaming users for using it wrong (especially when they're not even on Windows) is odd.
Also, many people can see and are bothered by particular non-rectangular pixel layouts - it doesn't require doing odd things.
I have a 49" QD-OLED panel. I have never been one to find visual artifacts distracting, but fonts were awfully jaggy in Linux to the point I spent a week tinkering with font config and almost switched panels to a larger miniled since code looked horrible. And I'm someone who was fine with horrible VA low res low quality screens back in the day.
The sub pixel geometry on samsung's qd-oled needs very specific font configuration to be correctly displayed, and even then it just stops looking bad.
I bought a w-oled monitor for office work and gaming, very happy with my oled tv. I returned it after a couple days.
I got unbearable eye strain from it, even though I use rather large fonts, and the ppd was the same as with my previous IPS. Yes, the “more fuzzy” text was very much noticeable too.
Maybe it varies by person, maybe it’s influenced by things like astigmatism, but I totally see where the author is coming from, and I too am waiting for the new OLED panels to see if there’s an improvement.
In my experience, it seems to. My astigmatism (or other eye stuff) seems to move different colours different amounts, leading to wider RGB pixels and making things like Cleartype so much worse. So people were enjoying Cleartype and I was hating the obvious colour-changes and fringes that somehow they weren't seeing. I assume some people are lucky enough to have aberrations that actually make cleartype more pleasant.
I do too. Combined with progressive lenses and I have significant chromatic aberration issues. Blue and red pixels require different focus, which is sometimes an issue when solid blues and reds are on screen in close proximity. I turn off pure blue colors in my terminal emulator, for example.
That sounds familiar. I also have ever so slight green-brown color blindness. It's only really noticeable in low light (like in the woods in evenings), but that could well all stack up to be a problem.
I also have significant problems with blue LEDs around the house, to the point where I've removed, replaced, or covered almost all of them. They really, really bother me because it feels like my eyes never focus on them and they leave me feeling slightly disoriented.
One of the benefits of having somewhat terrible eyesight :). I can see the fine details if I squint and get closer, but for me everything fringes because that's just what astigmatism or a smudge on my glasses does.
The issue with his monitor is that regular subpixel hinting of cleartype doesn't work because of different subpixel layout, and DPI is not high enough to not need it. It is a real problem.
Those do show the best example, yes. And best to photograph. But it's also noticeable on any high contrast edge or a fine line, like a drawing in Autodesk Fusion (CAD software) or just the lines between spreadsheets.
And no, no Cleartype here because (as mentioned in the first paragraph) it's a Mac running macOS.
I use smaller fonts as well and when I first got an older OLED display with a pixel layout not supported by Windows ClearType, I used BetterClearTypeTuner and later MacType to adjust it. It was leagues better after tweaking a few settings and I'm very happy with text now, even on my AW3425DW, which has an older layout they moved on from in recent generations.
You act like being able to see this a minority opinion, it’s not, and it’s a known issue. And you don’t need to be sitting close, or using a tiny font to notice it.
My 4K OLED is noticeably less clear compared to an IPS display and I’d never use it for productivity as a result, because why would I willingly subject myself to an objectively worse experience?
It's a tradeoff - if you want a fast clear gaming monitor with pure blacks, you get an OLED. If you want the clearest text and are OK with middling response time, you get an IPS.
There is also VA which provides deep (though not pure) blacks, clear text and decent response time though you get some slight smearing on high contrast edges.
Personally i prefer VA to IPS by far because IPS looks washed out to me.
Whether it's a minority opinion or not, I really can't see the difference. Even when he posted highly zoomed images of VS Code ("Visual Studio Code does a wonderful job demonstrating this problem"), the only thing I noticed is that the image on the right looks slightly brighter than the image on the left.
Then as I went back to where he was describing the problem ("fringing"), I kept forgetting when I scrolled back to the images which was which (and which image was supposed to be "worse").
I'm on a 2025 Macbook, so maybe the laptop's monitor masks the issue?
That's an interesting point you mention about not seeing it, because prior to buying an OLED I'd read a bunch about fringing and in many articles I just... couldn't see it. I couldn't tell what was being illustrated in the images.
It wasn't until I sat in front of one for a few hours, in my room and lighting and with my apps and had funny-feeling eyes and a this-seems-off feeling that I decided to investigate. And yes, those macro photos show fringing, but it /is/ hard to understand how the subpixel pattern translates to on-screen weirdness until you've seen it for yourself.
I'm on a M4 Macbook, and I can see it. I'm inclined to totally accept the blog author's experience as true for them, I'd probably experience the same thing.
Adequate as I can't really tell the difference but with OLED you get perfect blacks which make dark mode and white text on black background look much better.
I used to work on custom embedded UIs that supported fractional scaling. This shit is hard.
You have to understand there's enormous effort that needs to go into this to make things look good. It's absolutely no surprise to me that Jobs era Apple used to stick to integer scaling ratios with relatively low-res phones while the competition battled with paper specs.
The trick to make things look good is to be mindful of the pixel grid, (and the subpixel layout). You have to choose font spacing and fonts so that major font features line up with the pixel grid. You sometimes have to slide a letter a bit to the left or right, which might result in inconsistent spacing, you might even want to have multiple versions of characters to hide these issues.
This applies to borders as well (both spacing and thickness).
Sometimes you can't make it look good no matter what you try - and the designer has to change it.
While flexbox and other super-duper layout algorithms might be very clever, if you use them, there's no way to line things up perfectly, and if you expect to, you might be in a world of hurt.
Adding PPI is a poor way to fix this. Even if you 2x the resolution, going from 1080p, to 4K, these issues still persist, and you quickly run out of hardware beyond that.
There's no wonder why modern 'flat' UIs usually have 1-2 pixel-ish gradients on edges of features, or use smooth transitions, it's a cop out - but that's the only thing that works with flexible layout, different pixel densities. But subtly, you notice things looking a bit blurry, just as if the images were low-res, even though the pixel density is insane.
ClearType is brilliant, but it only works with a certain set of assumptions, like a bit of light bleed (which exists on LCD but not on OLED afaik), and needs to know the subpixel layout, and can result in absolutely gorgeous looking fonts with relatively low res displays.
There's a reason why Windows 95-era UIs have a cult following - it's insane how sharp they looked even on hardware that on paper is much worse than modern stuff.
I don't generally use tiny fonts and I hopefully don't sit unreasonably close to the screen yet fringing is very apparent to me (even on window borders, i.e. it's not a font rendering quirk in my case). Just another anecdotal data point.
If your job involves detailed text review (such as coding) then splash out on a display with a pixel density of at least 250 PPI.
The screen shown in this blog looks like it's ~140 PPI. Sure these screens are cheap, but they're best used for moving graphical content.
In the demonstration image the text is just 9 pixels tall, while thatis legible, it is unacceptable for long term reading and is completely reliant on subpixel rendering to produce an impression of smoothness.
Totally agree. I’ve been using the Asus ProArt PA32QCV (6k monitor) for the past few months, and it has been great for coding. It’s about 220 PPI, or what Apple calls “retina”.
I've had my eyes on this Asus for a while now, but the rtings review mentions aggressive matte coating that seems like it might negate the high PPI advantage by randomly blurring the result. What's your impression?
I bought the 6K ProArt on launch, replacing an older 4k 27" Dell monitor. The new monitor is definitely an upgrade, but not as great as I was hoping. Like you said, the matte coating is by far the worst part of this monitor. I would say that it isn't bad enough to return the monitor, but it's definitely noticeable on white windows.
I've definitely enjoyed having the extra screen real estate over the 27" monitor, and the extra resolution has been very helpful for having a bunch of windows open in Unity.
This year at CES there were a number of new monitors unveiled that compete in this space. There's a new Samsung monitor (G80HS) that is a 32" 6k with a higher refresh rate than what you'd find with existing offerings. Unfortunately it has the matte coating instead of glossy, so clarity will suffer.
Also of interest are the new 27" 4k offerings with true RGB stripe subpixel layout. This should fix text rendering problems, especially on Windows. Both Samsung and LG are making these OLED monitors with the true RGB layout. There will almost certainly be glossy coatings offered with these panels, and they'll have higher refresh rates than IPS. The main downside will be brightness for full screen white windows. I think the Samsung panel is a bit better than LG in terms of brightness.
This is akin to how I've (technically?) stepped back from a 5K 27" to a 4K 32". Likely due to scaling and how far I sit from the screen (about 24" -- average I think) things look the same? At least, I don't notice that the 4K is any worse.
Me being me, I can't help but think I should have a 5K or 6K or whatever, but the price is... high. So I figured I'd try a 4K 32" since the OLED was cheap and the result was this post because the subpixel pattern messed with me. But now for the replacement I'm looking at a simple (but nice color / high end) 4K 32" IPS LCD.
And having been using one for the last day, I'm pretty content with it. It's like everything I wanted from the OLED without the eye strain.
To be honest, it’s probably the worst 6k monitor out there, but I’m still enjoying it. I got it basically before any reviews were out and I initially thought I had a defective model. The matte coating is pretty bad, and the screen being darker near the edges is also very noticeable when you look for it. It’s also 60hz which is pretty disappointing.
With all that said, I would still recommend it over anything not retina.
Wait, I do my work on a 4K display, according to a calculator I have a PPI of 150, but I already find my 4K display completely overkill!
Now, I spent an amount of my work life staring at a company-issued 27 inch 1080p display, and that was absolutely horrible, but with 4K, I'm not sure if I would even be able to see the improvement if I went to 6K or 8K even, which I always thought was mostly useless outside of gigantic television sets. Is it really worth it? Can you really genuinely see the text blurring on a 4K monitor?
I would probably see text quality issues on that setup. It depends on how far away the monitor is. PPI on phone screens tends to be much higher than PPI on laptops which tends to be higher than PPI on monitors, because each is typically used at a different distance.
If you're not using text around 9 pixels tall, as in the article, you're probably going to be okay. On a 27 inch screen at a typical office screen distance, I'd probably want 6k, but 4k is pretty good and 1080p is terrible.
The issue is with font rendering software not properly accounting for the subpixel arrangement of the display. I guess it’s a valid concern from a simple pragmatic perspective as a consumer, but as an enthusiast it’s not strictly a problem with OLED. Surely there’s some work out there that tries to improve font rendering on nonuniform subpixel layouts, right?
The other issue is that it's not just a text problem. It affects any high color contrast edges, especially directly vertical or horizontal ones. So subpixel rendering tweaks for text rendering (eg: Cleartype) don't solve the whole problem.
Same here, running MacType/Windows on a 65" LG 4k OLED C5 TV with 100% scaling as my main display for all kind of stuff incl. coding. But i must admit that fonts on Linux looks noticeable better out of the box and MacType/Windows does not apply to all applications. E.g. for LibreOffice i had to change the rendering engine(disable skia) under options and on PDFGear MacType does not apply at all.
Anyway, OLED is great, I'm sitting 2 arm length away from the panel.
People complaining are probably Gen.Z that never sat in-front of an ol' CRT in the 90s and are spoiled by smartphones running 4k on minuscule 7" displays with 460ppi.
I've tried MacType before but sadly it came with significant slow down in many applications, lists would lag while scrolling, etc.
It's really annoying because all I really want is to disable ClearType on my primary high DPI monitor while keeping it with default settings for my two side monitors, but Windows does not let you configure it per monitor.
As the article states, this is why RGB Stripe layouts are the next big things in OLED. Quite exciting, and sub pixel layouts that aren't good for text are exactly why I have an XG27AQMR in front of me for work/gaming instead of an OLED (27" IPS LCD, 1440p, 300hz)
I upgraded my 27" 1440p LCD to a 27" 4k OLED (PG27UCDM) and for me text rendering was a big upgrade.
Yes there is color fringing if I take a zoomed in picture with my camera, but nothing I notice in day to day use. And I've been highly annoyed by missing or bad ClearType rendering.
I specifically went for the 27" to get the extra pixel density though. I might not have been happy with the 32" variant.
That said, the true blacks and bright whites is something else. For me a very significant upgrade both on the desktop and in games, despite the previous being an upper-level LCD when I bought it 4-5 years ago.
Yeah I'm quite excited to move to the 34" ultra-wide 1440p RGB stripe 360hz monitor they announced! OLED is an amazing technology, and this was IMO the final barrier to overcome to beat IPS on nearly all axes.
I just ordered this monitor earlier this week (still waiting for it to be delivered), did you need to tweak it or use some thing like MacType like others are suggesting in this thread?
RGB strip isn't really better, it's just what cleartype happens to understand. A lot of these OLED developments came from either TV or mobile, neither of which had legacy subpixel hinting to deal with. So the subpixel layouts were optimized for both manufacturing but also human perception. Humans do not perceive all colors equally, we are much more sensitive to green than blue for example. Since OLED is emissive, it needs to balance how bright the color emitted is with how sensitive human wet wear is to it.
> A lot of these OLED developments came from either TV or mobile
I remember getting one of the early Samsung OLED PenTile displays, and despite the display having a higher resolution on-paper than the display on the LCD phone I replaced it with, the fuzzy fringey text made it far less readable in practice. There were other issues with that phone so I was happy to resell it and go back to my previous one.
Pentile typical omits subpixels to achieve the resolution, so yes if you have an LCD and an AMOLED with the exact same resolution and the AMOLED is pentile, it won't be as sharp because it has literally fewer subpixels. But that's rapidly outpaced by modern pentile AMOLEDs just having a pixel density that vastly exceeds nearly any LCD anymore (at least on mobile).
There's RGB subpixel AMOLEDs as well (such as on the Nintendo Switch OLED) even though they aren't necessarily RGB strip. As in, just because it's not RGB strip doesn't mean it's pentile. There are other arrangements. Those other arrangements being for example the ones complained about on current desktop OLED monitors like the one in the article. It's not pentile causing problems since it's not pentile at all.
iPhones all use PenTile and nobody complains about fuzzy text on them. Early generations of pentile weren't that great, but modern ones look fantastic at basically everything. See also everyone considers the iPad Pro to have probably the best display available at any price point - and it's not an RGB strip, either.
They've just have had issues manufacturing it, but there were several monitors from MSI, Asus and Gigabyte with Samsung's latest gen QD-OLED display announced (and reviewed) this week with RGB stripe subpixel layout, so we are there now (as soon as they are available), and this article is somewhat poorly timed.
I'd say that because the article documents my experience at this point in time, the only poor timing is when my old-ish monitor died and I went looking for a replacement. And this article documents my experience with that.
The problem with strip layouts is if you rotate the monitor (or phone) you lose all the subpixel rendering benefits. OLED pentiles work better in all rotations.
Originally OLED TVs used different sized subpixels for different colors as part of their wear management. Red wears out the fastest so it would have the largest subpixel.
I have been using a 48" LG OLED TV as a monitor for about 2 years. I thought I would love it. But I hated it. Text looked horrible. I was going mad and then Google'd a bit to see if others hated it too. And found that they did. But luckily there are settings that can be changed to turn it into an excellent computer monitor. Once I changed the right settings, it was love. I have 3 monitors on my desk. 32" LG LEDs on the side, 48" OLED in the middle. All 4K. I love this setup. I do occasionally think about replacing the LEDs. I just need the OLED pricing to drop a little more.
This was a validating read. I used a Samsung G9 OLED for the better part of a year and eventually had to stop because the eye strain was terrible. I found myself avoiding my desk because it was a chore to look at the display.
I've moved back to using a pair of 4K LCDs that I had, and honestly the resolution and aspect ratio are better for text and programming anyhow.
LCD is just the better technology. Besides what this article is about, OLED have awful burning and longevity problems. They're great for watching movies on the first month (and that's what gets them sold), but really not much else.
Something to consider is that the sub pixel layout of OLED is an engineering necessity to achieve longevity and cost (panel yield) objectives.
LCD can have a uniform layout because it's a passive layer doing the filtering. In OLED, each pixel is active and that blue one is trying to burn itself out much faster than the other two.
QD is one big blue emitter. The geometry has to be optimized to spread the wear out accordingly. WOLED has a 4th large, white sub pixel because the RGB filters cannot pass enough light for high luminance scenes.
Author doesn't mention it but he should try to use BetterDisplay.
MacOS interface scaling works well for screens around 200 PPI (2K 13inch, 4K 24inch, 5K 27inch). 4K 32inch is 138 PPI, which likely means he is not using default interface scaling which causes some distortion and out of grid pixel rendering.
BetterDisplay fixes this by using an integer multiple of intended GUI scaling resolution before projecting it (3X -> 1.5X).
I actually am using it, but I didn't want to go down the rabbithole of an all-encompassing article on displays, PPI, scaling, etc. Using it to scale the display really helps, but I find that for the size of things I like 3008x1692 (on a native 3840x2160 panel) and this looks fine on an LCD. And is better than native res on the OLED, but still not great. It still bugged my eyes.
I just went with native res for demoing things because it's a worst-case, but the fringing problem, because it affects all strong-contrast edges not just text. It was also really noticeable at thin/narrow lines such as when doing CAD or between cells in spreadsheets.
I can't bring myself to get an OLED when I know it will get the taskbar and window decorations burned into it after a few years. One day if they invent one with truly zero burn-in I'll consider it.
Same here. OLED is fine for gamers who use it a couple hours here and there but for a system that's on 8+ hour per day with a taskbar and the usual work apps, this is just not adequate.
I like to use monitors for a very long time, knowing it will have burn in and lower brightness over time does not sit well with me. I had a phone with the burger menu of AnkiDroid permanently burned in, I am trying to stick to IPS screens after that one.
Yep, my LG TV got noticeable burn in after 5 years - Minecraft hearts and other gaming related things from my son. 9 years in and the colours in the middle of the screen are terrible too - I think the self-generated heat has caused this. It’s unwatchable for me but my wife doesn’t seem to mind.
According to Hardware Unboxed this problem goes away with the new generation displays. They are switching over to using a standard (LCD-like) striped pixel layout.
Must say my first generation Samsung display looks amazing both for gaming and programming though. If it wasn’t for the annoying smart-tv stuff, and the mini connectors, it’s a perfect monitor.
> Within the past few weeks LG has announced RGB stripe OLED panels which will resolve this problem, but there aren’t currently any monitors available using these panels
3440x1440 @ 34" (110ppi): Asus PG34WCDN, Asus XG34WCDMS, MSI MEG X, MSI MPG 341CQR X36
Digging into this further, I also found another Asus panel that's closer, if not all the way there yet (5K would be, but this is 4K) to the usual Mac pixel densities:
3840x2160 @ 27" (163ppi): Asus PG27UCWM
I'll still be waiting for 5K @ 27" with the new tech, but I'm really glad to see they finally solved this!
It's especially important for people trying to use lower-resolution OLED (e.g., for gaming) - the text fringing can look quite bad. At higher DPI it can be less noticeable, though horizontal lines still have noticeable fringes.
Dell monitors are very hit or miss for me. I’ve got two with very similar model numbers to the OP. One of them has a straight vertical line of red pixels at (30%, 0%). The other doesn’t have an integrated webcam.
Meanwhile I’ve got an MSI OLED 32” 240Hz @ 4k monitor which was super expensive but is absolutely incredible. It takes getting used to a monitor that performs a maintenance routine on itself any time you leave it active for more than a few hours. But it’s great for work (with some aggressive zoom levels) and gaming (with some aggressive black point levels).
Off topic, but JFYI, with last year's firmware update (OLED CARE 2.0), you can now delay the refresh notification for up to 24 hours. I haven't seen the notification pop up since updating.
> OLEDs make great TVs and gaming monitors [...] But on desktop monitors for still things — text and fine lines — OLEDs currently just aren’t great
It seems that LCD has long been the best technology for desktop monitors - but interestingly, despite its popularity, may never have been the best technology for TVs. CRT, plasma and now OLED have all had better image quality than contemporary LCDs.
I have sympathy because it's the kind of problem you probably cannot pick up in the shop, or quickly. You need time in your home, with your HDMI or D-Link, your ambient lighting, your settings.
I begin to feel like we may need the equivalent of what audio shops used to have: a listening room with normal furniture and a big switch to test different things, but for eyes not ears.
I only buy s/h Dell monitors 3-5 years behind bleeding edge because I am a cheapskate with old eyes, who can't see past the dust on my glasses anyway. But I genuinely can relate to this problem. It would suck to invest in the best you can afford and find it's not doing what the dollars expect for you.
> I begin to feel like we may need the equivalent of what audio shops used to have: a listening room with normal furniture and a big switch to test different things, but for eyes not ears.
It doesn’t even need this. The old way of buying stuff was from a shop. With big ticket items you build a relationship with staff and their recommendations helped.
Now it’s all shipped or bought from faceless big box stores.
It's a pity such basics as displaying text properly are not prioritized by the OS vendors (one of the many ignored Windows issues https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595) while a lot of effort is wasted on stuff users dislike
I experienced the same issue with the Alienware 27" 360 Hz OLED monitor. While it was great for gaming and I loved the refresh rate, it was terrible for everything else. Text always looked blurry, my eyes would keep trying to focus it and tired themselves out. I started getting headaches and began to doubt my prescription. After months of investigation, visits to the optometrist, I finally narrowed it down to the monitor being the culprit. I gave it away to my son, who on the other hand was thrilled to receive a bonafide gaming monitor. He uses it at 2x scaling and couldn't be happier.
These monitors are great when scaled but have real issues rendering text and other fine details at their native resolution.
Given that there isn't any objective basis for the default scaling factor of a monitor being what we call 1x, I would argue that 2x scaling isn't any less native than 1x
The 2x scaling refers to the OS UI being set to 200%. That means each UI pixel is rendered by 2x2 physical pixels of the monitor. It has a very clear and objective definition. Did you mean something else?
Got a nice swyve 34 inch UWQHD with a Samsung panel that is really nice for gaming, and really bad for coding/studying. It's not nice on eyes either. Not making the same mistake again.
I know it's the panel, because I have an office BenQ 21 inch with technology called sth like EyeCare on the side as the second monitor. Compared to the gaming one - it's a balm on my eyes. Sometimes I'd put a document or LLM window there even when the main screen is empty, just because of how nice it feels on the eyes.
Except for few situations where the poor man's HDR does help me see more details in the dark (small edge in multiplayer), I believe that I would be better off with a monitor engineered for office work.
Think about it, I got lured by all the gaming hype, but what I really needed is a monitor that is 80% office and 20% gaming, not 100% gaming. And I believe that's the case with others complaining about the eye strain.
Moisturizing eye drops and Safeeyes (eye exercising Linux app) help a lot though. Safeeyes has an alternative on Mac called EyeLeo (but never used that). Recommend them both to everyone in this thread. Take care of your eyes. They are the most suspectable to drying part of our body - eye exercises help for that. And they are fed with only a miniscule artery, eye exercises help keep a good throughput on that too.
I guess that's why the two most important suppliers of OLED panels for PC monitors (LG and Samsung) are rearranging their subpixel to use LCD-like RGB stripes:
I recently replaced my Google Pixelbook with a Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 with a 1920x1200 14" OLED screen. The text definitely feels off to me. It's bearable, but I wouldn't want this effect on a primary device.
For me the solution to subpixel issues with tiny fonts is to not do subpixels. I have been looking at bitmapped fonts my whole life so I don't see any reason to give up all that perceptual context.
Which is why I ended up buying a replacement 24" 1920x1080 recently. I needed pixels large enough to distinguish with my fave small font. If I want more pixels at once on the screen I need a larger screen.
I picked up the same monitor as the author. I'm pretty happy with it myself - I have the Pro-Art display that the author has as well, and the volume of color makes a huge difference for me.
But OLED is a remarkably personal technology. Some people also have issues with how the images are "strobed" during upgrades, etc.
I’ve recently bought the LG with 4th generation OLED, and for me that works for long coding sessions (I use it for work). They shifted or did something with the pixel arrangement for this generation just for text legibility.
If the author is sensitive to this level of detail, they should just get a color calibrated high-DPI screen (like an Apple Studio Display) and call it a day.
Not on Oled issue but I've noticed that vscode fonts appear much sharper than visual studio fonts. It's subtle, but just enough to make me dislike looking at code in visual studio.
I use two monitors, one is a MSI and the other is a Samsung NVIDIA g sync. The MSI is fed through a PD cord and the Samsung is fed through a HDMI cable. I see the OLED at best buy and while they look great I'm not thrilled about the price tag attached to them. I have broken monitors from moving or accidentally dropping them. I don't feel bad about buying another for $250 and replacing it after two years.
I really love my qd-oled but the eye strain over the last 2 years when using this particular monitor is quite a bit more than my previous monitors. I just recently got better backlighting and went through some settings tweaking but it's still a bit harsh.
The tradeoff is worth it in a lot of scenarios, but I've been thinking about getting a "coding only" monitor that I use for long sessions instead.
It's a bit sad to see hardware manufacturers changing the pixel layout because we weren't able to adapt modern software to do sub-pixel font rendering that works with different layouts out of the box.
On the other hand: it's nice to see the march of pixel density increasing which makes this problem go away entirely.
I used an LG C2 42" as a monitor for a few years. The color fringing was particularly bad for me because I like yellow text and LG uses RWBG. 4K 42" and 1440p 27" are about 110 DPI. This is not enough. 4K 27" is about 160 DPI. That is enough. We've already pushed past needing to care about subpixel layouts if you properly weight pixel density in your selection.
I haven't really noticed color fringing since changing from a 1st gen panel to a 3rd gen panel at a higher PPI. What I've been curious about though is why the fringing on vertical stripe RGB isn't as noticeable. I would expect to see fringing horizontally for that layout.
The text fringing can be an issue, but the benefits of OLED more than make up for it. Going from IPS to OLED was a step-function improvement, like upgrading from a HDD to SSD.
I never had any problems with QD-OLED and never saw any color fringing. But it turns out I'm red-green colorblind, so I probably just can't see enough contrast between red and green to notice the fringing.
I just recently picked up a 49" Samsung G9 OLED and also had a similar experience. It felt like the picture was moving and I couldn't focus correctly. I first chalked it up to the low PPI, but after some googling, it was text fringing.
OTOH the OLED panels on Apple's iPad Pro series are outstanding, and I'm excited for them to come to MacBooks. Yet another example of Apple's hardware team taking its time to do things right.
I always find these articles really interesting, maybe it's just the way my brain works but I can't ever find any meaningful differences or issues with any of the examples.
> but as noted we found this quite obvious to the eye as well
... and then 2 images that look exactly the same to me :(
Buying an OLED screen three years ago was the best tech investment in a long time. Nowadays most tech is "the same, but 5% faster" while OLED truly felt like a revolution. For a year after buying it I was still excited about it. Whenever I use LCD panels I feel pain in my everything. The fact that Ally X uses an LCD panel is its worst problem.
> but sir, what about fringing
Skill issue. Just configure your text rendering correctly.
It's so hard to find OLEDs with a sensible subpixel layout these days. I wish this stuff were documented and that you could find traditional horizontal subpixel layouts in the OLED mass market.
I have at least one friend who wants individually-addressible bayer layouts, but that likely won't happen.
The display the author doesn't like is a specific model Dell QD-OLED with a sub pixel arrangement that causes a fringe above / below text.
There are macro screenshots that reveal the sub pixel details of a preferred LCD compared the disliked Dell OLED, and it's easy to agree with the author's discontentment.
But the categorical complaint about "OLED" is an over generalization.
Treat the report as a warning to investigate the sub pixel characteristics of any monitor you may be considering.
Agreed. Personally, I find WOLED quite comfortable, especially for text, since I spend 90% of my time looking at terminals: white text on a black background. Having the vast majority of the display off feels wonderful.
I'm also on an WOLED with no DPI scaling and also find it easy on the eyes. I do have to disable subpixel hinting though, afaik there is none optimized for anything other than traditional RGB or BGR. I don't think it's a big deal since I usually don't like it on RGB LCDs anyway...
> I do have to disable subpixel hinting though, afaik there is none optimized for anything other than traditional RGB or BGR. I don't think it's a big deal since I usually don't like it on RGB LCDs anyway...
Yeah, I've had subpixel antialiasing disabled for a long time, since before my first OLED; I prefer grayscale antialiasing.
While the author's complaint is perfectly valid, in practice the advantages of even current OLEDs - for me - far outweigh any disadvantages due to subpixel layout fringing and everything else. Even for programming, the lack of backlight and resulting infinite contrast makes such a huge difference in my day to day life that I refuse to use a non-OLED monitor anymore for any purpose whatsoever. Heck it could be half the DPI and I'd still go for OLED anytime.
The only reason LCDs still exist is price, nothing else.
Yeah. In fairness this may be irrelevant as I've only had OLED on phone screens and not monitors, but for me OLED is about reducing the light coming off the panel. Any IPS I've tried just hurts even on the lowest brightness. The push against #000000 in recent years in favor of brighter dark modes and reducing contrast by making the background lighter instead of the foreground darker has been a big aggravation.
Yep -- it's an IPS LCD. And based on the failure more (here's a video of it [1]) with a vertical bar dark and the whole screen blinking when large white sections are displayed, I believe it's likely a power supply problem, maybe coupled to draw from the backlight. (Localized smaller LEDs, more get turned on when things are white.)
I'd been having an issue with a vertical dark bar during wakeup for a few months, but it'd go away after the whole screen came up so I pushed off opening a case. Then one day the whole thing started having problems.
> specific model Dell QD-OLED with a sub pixel arrangement that causes a fringe
It’s in fact most, if not all of the PC display OLEDs on the market today because they almost all use non standard subpixel arrangements, but will change soon with the introduction of newer generation panels.
> But the categorical complaint about "OLED" is an over generalization
It’s really not, given again we are talking about the majority of PC OLEDs in production today having subpixel layouts that cause issues for users with text rendering.
I love how he blames OLED for this, but doesn't care to learn the actual cause: that isn't an RGB subpixel orientation. There are many OLEDs with correct subpixel orientation.
He bought a factory defective monitor. LCDs like this exist, Samsung sold them as AMOLEDS called Pentile. They are hideous.
Until subpixel is eradicated from existence, we shall continue to suffer this.
The problem is such:
1) Windows exists.
2) Windows invented Cleartype for Vista, it was ugly and fringed hard because they misunderstood human perception, the sRGB standard, and math.
3) Windows then readjusted Cleartype for DirectWrite. OSX before Retina and Freetype use subpixel tuning also compatible with human perception, sRGB, and math.
4) Many applications on Windows do not know how to ask Windows what the subpixel orientation is; either they assume RGB all the time (do not do this!) or they only read the first monitor (do not do this!). Windows can tell you per monitor, this is the only correct way. This API has existed since Vista.
5) This problem also effects DPI: they either cannot scale or only scale for the first monitor. Windows scaling for you causes _exceptionally bad_ color fringing for subpixel rendering. Again, the API for that has existed since Vista.
6) Many monitors do not list their subpixel orientation in their EDID. Ones that do and also are rotation sensitive do not set their EDID for RGB->VRGB->BGR->VBGR as you rotate them. Windows assumes RGB for any monitor missing that EDID field.
7) Windows only knows (V)RGB and (V)BGR. It does not know W+RGB, it doesn't know any sort of complex multi-row arrangement (such as Pentile).
8) Many applications ignore your Cleartype settings in Windows, and use RGB at default color weights no matter what you do, even if you turn subpixel off and do greyscale only.
9) And the worst sin of all: people embed screenshots in their documentation and websites, and they never update them. The Internet is full of Vista-era fringe-filled Cleartype text. This ties into 5, but is worth mentioning as its own.
Edit: On second reading, the author says they're on a Mac. Macs don't have subpixel rendering anymore. I don't understand the author's complaint, they have greyscale and avoid all these problems.
I will bitch about Apple's mistakes over the past decade, but removing subpixel rendering from their ecosystem was a smart move: makes all their text rendering compatible with all future monitors forever, and moving to HiDPI eliminates the need for it anyways.
He's also got Cleartype on and set to RGB stripe even though the OLED is not RGB stripe (though to be fair, Windows doesn't really make it clear what each page of the ClearType tuner does).
But yeah, if you use a _tiny_ font and sit _really_ close to the screen, you see fringing. In practice for me, it's been unnoticeable.
At one point in time 95%+ of HN comments were cheering on about Atom the text editor and later VSCode as being fast enough or unnoticeable. When Sublime user are baffled as to why. And Sublime isn't the fastest text editor either before Zed came out.
Yes, 10 times out of 10 I could tell an OLED font rendering to LCD. I wish I couldn't. Some people call it taste, some call it absurd requirement.
I could go on and on. The point is most people aren't very picky and picky is a definition defined by average. But there are those of us who have, let say very high standards that cares about PPI, Refresh Rate, Colour accuracy etc. Keyboard Key's typing distance, trackpad responsiveness, all the tiny details that I wish I could unseen and un-feel.
As the article state, RGB OLED Tandem is coming out, and I cant wait to see it in person. I have been pro LCD on Laptop for so long that when I learned Apple will soon ditch LCD for OLED I was worried. Hopefully the new sub pixel layout will fix it.
I'm sure I would notice and be annoyed by this fringing too unless the pixels were so small I really couldn't see them. Probably needs to be slightly higher than 200 then. But I haven't seen oled monitors with such high DPIs. The highest I've seen is 4K on 27" which wouldn't even do for me on LCD.
I have Dell P2415Q, from 2015. There are, like, 4 other (legacy) models of 24" 4K out there, and that's it. I've no idea why they don't manufacture them.
I also have one, and it's holding up pretty well. A month or so ago I broke out my colorimeter and it had almost 100% sRGB at around 120 cd/m2. I don't recall the delta E, but it was very low.
While I didn't measure the backlight, it does seem to not go as bright as before, judging by the levels I set in the OSD. I never went above 70% or so when the sun was shining in the room (not directly on the screen, though), so it didn't have any effect on me.
I understand there are two version, I have the second one. But I don't think there's a difference in the panel itself, I think the change was related to HDMI support.
I can't comment on the latency, the only games I played on it were Civilization and Anno Something. Never had a problem for this.
The last new one I bought in 2018 I actually paid the same price for it than when I bought my first one in 2015, so it is one of those few computer accessories that significantly increased in price over its course rather than decrease.
If you cannot see the P2415Q degrading and/or being generally crap in any metric (EXCEPT DPI) when compared to even the non-IPS black Dell monitors from this decade, you are simply blind. They are early HiDPI-revival-era panels, and it shows.
Some of the newer IPS black panels are so good that it is tempting to just take the DPI hit and go 27''... albeit with care as it seems Dell has decided this last year to put some filter that further increases blurriness.
I actually have a newer "ips black" dell, an ultrasharp 3223qe and yes, it's much better.
But what I'm saying is that the old one is still good. However, I never pretended it was as good as current models. That's moving goalposts. The initial comment was about the display degrading, so comparing it to itself when new (not even other similar models from that era!). Mine only seems to have become somewhat dimmer, but not enough to matter in my day-to-day use since it's still brighter than I need.
I have the same monitor and i believe over 200ppi is pointless for desk monitor unless you are very close to it. It makes sense for laptops which you have much closer but i think most people have desk monitors way way further from the eyes.
Source https://www.sven.de/dpi/
A 32" 4k screen is nice enough and a reasonable one [0] can be had for a third of that. My I don't-know-how-old desktop I saved from the bin at work sporting an i5-6500 could drive that with no issues.
---
[0] Around 2020 I bought an LG something-or-other for 350 Euros for work, 32", 4k, some form of VA panel. It had pretty good colors and better contrast than the IPS monitor I use as a Sunday-photographer.
that's a weird start. for me the start is 4k with proper blacks & proper color calibration
> given that a couple of hundred more over 5 years would have surely improved productivity by a little bit
no company wants the bulk of it's people to improve their productivity by even a little bit. you should be productive enough, that's it.
> It felt almost done out of spite to keep people in their place
otherwise amazon and the likes would have competitors in every country. but I don't think it's out of spite.
it's the 'established' interpersonal culture between employers and employees, like in packs without natural alphas: if one beta-beta steals the show of the beta-alpha a few times too many, he's a goner. in packs with alphas the performer gets commended and a chance to compete for the top because you want your team to be lead by the currently best. hasn't been the case in our species for a long while now.
companies don't treat their employees bad out of spite, it's so they can stick to low, moderate(d) standards and cultures, ... and have an easy work life
The only thing that really needed an upgrade was the display. I ditched the crappy 1366x768 TN for a 1440p IPS and an LVDS-eDP conversion board. Looks fantastic. Runs great.
I can see the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz on phone screens, and I think it's worth the impact on battery life.
I can see the difference in speed between VSCode and editors like Sublime or Zed, however in this case I prefer the additional features at the cost of speed/smoothness.
After asking the owner of said screen how he could stand that... "stand what?"
Yep, I guess most people are not that picky.
When DLP projectors first came out, I couldn’t watch them. I would see colors breaking in fast motion scenes and whenever I would move my head even slightly (and … we all move our head slightly often when watching a movie).
When I told other people, some of them nodded in understanding, but the vast majority thought I was making things up - for them, it was a rock solid picture.
One of my friends replied: “I can see about 300hz. Not all the time - only when I have secadic movements; but that means many fluorescents, DLPs and other light sources drive me crazy. I guess you’re also a member of crazy club”
Some people can hear 26khz. Some people can see DLPs. Some people can see the alternating pattern….
My homework at that time revealed a couple of things:
1. Liquid crystals are individually driven by AC waveforms, not DC as one might assume. This is the nature of the beast. The frequency at which the signal alternates is not necessarily very high. Thus, sometimes, this alternating nature is visible.
2. Some displays use dithering. A given display might support just -- say -- 6 bits per subpixel. To get the full 8 or 10 or whatever number of bits that are expected as a final output, the in-between steps are approximated by switching between two values -- sometimes (again) at a fairly low frequency that is visible.
...
But anyway, that ViewSonic monitor: Most people thought it looked fine, but it drove me nuts.
Most of my friends, and nearly everyone on the internet was like, who buys Laptops because of speakers? They all sounded the same. Get a Dell. I think it was on either Anandtech or Tomshardware. It was certainly before Reddit Era.
Somewhere along the line, may be 2015 to 2020 Youtube reviewers have been bashing about Dell or other laptops for their crappy cost saving speakers. ( Thank You Dave2D ) And, manage to actually show it in the video how awful they were. All of a sudden "consumer" took notice and have since demanded better speakers. Laptop Speakers in the past 5 years have improved tremendously. As it turns out, people need to learn how to compare. And once they do, they cant unseen it.
But in all honesty in the past few years I really really wished I dont have the ability to tell the difference. To not have the mentality how something could be "better". To stop thinking how everything, from Food, Furniture, Tech Stack, UI, Buildings anything could be better.
Some say it is a gift, I think it is more of a curse. And it is a struggle and tiring. I then discovered my retreat for peace was to go out to nature and enjoy the creation of god.
Now, I take a more 80/20 approach: I clearly define my needs and shut down any thoughts about features and capabilities that I don't need right now. Frankly, after years of thinking that I might use a feature later, I realise that I never do and never recover my investment in these kinds of gadgets.
Finding a trustworthy review source is key — by trustworthy, I mean mostly in line with your own standards. However, if you can try it yourself, that's always better.
For sound on small devices with clear voice and a good dynamic range, Samsung is quite good with its high-end Galaxy Tab line.
This is how I became quite learned in sound reproduction (incl. acoustics and psychoacoustics) then bought Genelec loudspeakers, for example. But I don't care about finding Samsung B-dies (I think?) for my RAM.
You know about things that are to others unknown unknowns. Since ignorance is bliss, it definitely feels like a curse to you, and since what one doesn’t know can hurt them, others would see as a blessing.
Funny world we live in.
Nothing man-made could even compare with that perfection.
I second this. I can tell, and I would never wish that ability on my worst enemy. Very glad there's a (slim, but exists) market catering to that — and that I no longer have to buy a monitor that costs as much as a small motorcycle to not be constantly infuriated at everything in my field of vision when working.
I kind of want to see one of the Atom vs Sublime people use that for a hot minute.
At home I upgraded from 60hz to 165hz and was underwhelmed. I see the difference .. but eh.
There's no Cleartype in use here, as the first paragraph says, it's macOS.
And I'm using the default font sizes because they work well for me on an LCD. The point of this post is to document my experience with trying a current-gen generally-available OLED and how it did not work out well because of the subpixel arrangement.
It's also not just an issue on text, it affects any high contrast edges, especially perfectly vertical or horizontal ones. This meant that CAD stuff, spreadsheets (the grid), and large colored sections in graphic design software looked off as well.
I doubt it's Cleartype, the close up photo of the U3223QE show all subpixels uniformly dimmed on the fringes. The post also says the monitor is attached to a Mac mini and a previous post about OpenSCAD has a screenshot with MacOS window decorations.
Had I been using this on Windows I would have started to solve it by trying to tune that.
There is no Cleartype; this is macOS. And as mentioned I couldn't see the fringing from normal use, that only became evident with macro photos. During normal use it just looked sparkly or weird or artifacted.
And yes, the fonts are small, but that default size in VS Code or Numbers.app -- the example photos -- work well for me. And look fine on an LCD.
Also, many people can see and are bothered by particular non-rectangular pixel layouts - it doesn't require doing odd things.
The sub pixel geometry on samsung's qd-oled needs very specific font configuration to be correctly displayed, and even then it just stops looking bad.
I got unbearable eye strain from it, even though I use rather large fonts, and the ppd was the same as with my previous IPS. Yes, the “more fuzzy” text was very much noticeable too.
Maybe it varies by person, maybe it’s influenced by things like astigmatism, but I totally see where the author is coming from, and I too am waiting for the new OLED panels to see if there’s an improvement.
I do have astigmatism. You do make me wonder if this plays a part as well...
I also have significant problems with blue LEDs around the house, to the point where I've removed, replaced, or covered almost all of them. They really, really bother me because it feels like my eyes never focus on them and they leave me feeling slightly disoriented.
And no, no Cleartype here because (as mentioned in the first paragraph) it's a Mac running macOS.
You act like being able to see this a minority opinion, it’s not, and it’s a known issue. And you don’t need to be sitting close, or using a tiny font to notice it.
My 4K OLED is noticeably less clear compared to an IPS display and I’d never use it for productivity as a result, because why would I willingly subject myself to an objectively worse experience?
Personally i prefer VA to IPS by far because IPS looks washed out to me.
It actually helped me enforce a separation between WFH/where I relax anyway, so not the worst.
Then as I went back to where he was describing the problem ("fringing"), I kept forgetting when I scrolled back to the images which was which (and which image was supposed to be "worse").
I'm on a 2025 Macbook, so maybe the laptop's monitor masks the issue?
That's an interesting point you mention about not seeing it, because prior to buying an OLED I'd read a bunch about fringing and in many articles I just... couldn't see it. I couldn't tell what was being illustrated in the images.
It wasn't until I sat in front of one for a few hours, in my room and lighting and with my apps and had funny-feeling eyes and a this-seems-off feeling that I decided to investigate. And yes, those macro photos show fringing, but it /is/ hard to understand how the subpixel pattern translates to on-screen weirdness until you've seen it for yourself.
Exactly what I want for the thing I stare at for 8 hours/day. Not great. Not good. Perfectly adequate.
You have to understand there's enormous effort that needs to go into this to make things look good. It's absolutely no surprise to me that Jobs era Apple used to stick to integer scaling ratios with relatively low-res phones while the competition battled with paper specs.
The trick to make things look good is to be mindful of the pixel grid, (and the subpixel layout). You have to choose font spacing and fonts so that major font features line up with the pixel grid. You sometimes have to slide a letter a bit to the left or right, which might result in inconsistent spacing, you might even want to have multiple versions of characters to hide these issues.
This applies to borders as well (both spacing and thickness).
Sometimes you can't make it look good no matter what you try - and the designer has to change it.
While flexbox and other super-duper layout algorithms might be very clever, if you use them, there's no way to line things up perfectly, and if you expect to, you might be in a world of hurt.
Adding PPI is a poor way to fix this. Even if you 2x the resolution, going from 1080p, to 4K, these issues still persist, and you quickly run out of hardware beyond that.
There's no wonder why modern 'flat' UIs usually have 1-2 pixel-ish gradients on edges of features, or use smooth transitions, it's a cop out - but that's the only thing that works with flexible layout, different pixel densities. But subtly, you notice things looking a bit blurry, just as if the images were low-res, even though the pixel density is insane.
ClearType is brilliant, but it only works with a certain set of assumptions, like a bit of light bleed (which exists on LCD but not on OLED afaik), and needs to know the subpixel layout, and can result in absolutely gorgeous looking fonts with relatively low res displays.
There's a reason why Windows 95-era UIs have a cult following - it's insane how sharp they looked even on hardware that on paper is much worse than modern stuff.
Windows?
The screen shown in this blog looks like it's ~140 PPI. Sure these screens are cheap, but they're best used for moving graphical content.
In the demonstration image the text is just 9 pixels tall, while thatis legible, it is unacceptable for long term reading and is completely reliant on subpixel rendering to produce an impression of smoothness.
I've definitely enjoyed having the extra screen real estate over the 27" monitor, and the extra resolution has been very helpful for having a bunch of windows open in Unity.
This year at CES there were a number of new monitors unveiled that compete in this space. There's a new Samsung monitor (G80HS) that is a 32" 6k with a higher refresh rate than what you'd find with existing offerings. Unfortunately it has the matte coating instead of glossy, so clarity will suffer.
Also of interest are the new 27" 4k offerings with true RGB stripe subpixel layout. This should fix text rendering problems, especially on Windows. Both Samsung and LG are making these OLED monitors with the true RGB layout. There will almost certainly be glossy coatings offered with these panels, and they'll have higher refresh rates than IPS. The main downside will be brightness for full screen white windows. I think the Samsung panel is a bit better than LG in terms of brightness.
This is akin to how I've (technically?) stepped back from a 5K 27" to a 4K 32". Likely due to scaling and how far I sit from the screen (about 24" -- average I think) things look the same? At least, I don't notice that the 4K is any worse.
Me being me, I can't help but think I should have a 5K or 6K or whatever, but the price is... high. So I figured I'd try a 4K 32" since the OLED was cheap and the result was this post because the subpixel pattern messed with me. But now for the replacement I'm looking at a simple (but nice color / high end) 4K 32" IPS LCD.
And having been using one for the last day, I'm pretty content with it. It's like everything I wanted from the OLED without the eye strain.
With all that said, I would still recommend it over anything not retina.
Now, I spent an amount of my work life staring at a company-issued 27 inch 1080p display, and that was absolutely horrible, but with 4K, I'm not sure if I would even be able to see the improvement if I went to 6K or 8K even, which I always thought was mostly useless outside of gigantic television sets. Is it really worth it? Can you really genuinely see the text blurring on a 4K monitor?
If you're not using text around 9 pixels tall, as in the article, you're probably going to be okay. On a 27 inch screen at a typical office screen distance, I'd probably want 6k, but 4k is pretty good and 1080p is terrible.
The other issue is that it's not just a text problem. It affects any high color contrast edges, especially directly vertical or horizontal ones. So subpixel rendering tweaks for text rendering (eg: Cleartype) don't solve the whole problem.
Only Microsoft can fix it, and as far as I know, they don't seem interested.
https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype
https://github.com/CoolOppo/GDI-PlusPlus
I use MacType and it works really well. You can tune many more things than with ClearType.
Anyway, OLED is great, I'm sitting 2 arm length away from the panel.
People complaining are probably Gen.Z that never sat in-front of an ol' CRT in the 90s and are spoiled by smartphones running 4k on minuscule 7" displays with 460ppi.
It's really annoying because all I really want is to disable ClearType on my primary high DPI monitor while keeping it with default settings for my two side monitors, but Windows does not let you configure it per monitor.
Yes there is color fringing if I take a zoomed in picture with my camera, but nothing I notice in day to day use. And I've been highly annoyed by missing or bad ClearType rendering.
I specifically went for the 27" to get the extra pixel density though. I might not have been happy with the 32" variant.
That said, the true blacks and bright whites is something else. For me a very significant upgrade both on the desktop and in games, despite the previous being an upper-level LCD when I bought it 4-5 years ago.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CzgGB0kFJk
If I had to guess it could be something in the manufacturing process is more difficult.
I remember getting one of the early Samsung OLED PenTile displays, and despite the display having a higher resolution on-paper than the display on the LCD phone I replaced it with, the fuzzy fringey text made it far less readable in practice. There were other issues with that phone so I was happy to resell it and go back to my previous one.
There's RGB subpixel AMOLEDs as well (such as on the Nintendo Switch OLED) even though they aren't necessarily RGB strip. As in, just because it's not RGB strip doesn't mean it's pentile. There are other arrangements. Those other arrangements being for example the ones complained about on current desktop OLED monitors like the one in the article. It's not pentile causing problems since it's not pentile at all.
PenTile for example (as another commenter pointed out) was woeful with text, and made things look fuzzy.
I'm not a fan of ClearType, but even on Linux OLED text rendering just isn't as good in my experience (at normal desktop monitor DPI)
Perhaps its down to the algorithms most OSes use instead of just ClearType, but why hasn't it been solved by this point even outside Windows?
I'd say that because the article documents my experience at this point in time, the only poor timing is when my old-ish monitor died and I went looking for a replacement. And this article documents my experience with that.
When the OS assumes correctly what the monitor actually looks like, you get even better text rendering. When it guesses wrong you get a horrible mess.
I've moved back to using a pair of 4K LCDs that I had, and honestly the resolution and aspect ratio are better for text and programming anyhow.
My PC monitors are my only remaining LCD screens largely due to the text fringing issues mentioned in this article and bezel size.
LCD can have a uniform layout because it's a passive layer doing the filtering. In OLED, each pixel is active and that blue one is trying to burn itself out much faster than the other two.
I actually am using it, but I didn't want to go down the rabbithole of an all-encompassing article on displays, PPI, scaling, etc. Using it to scale the display really helps, but I find that for the size of things I like 3008x1692 (on a native 3840x2160 panel) and this looks fine on an LCD. And is better than native res on the OLED, but still not great. It still bugged my eyes.
I just went with native res for demoing things because it's a worst-case, but the fringing problem, because it affects all strong-contrast edges not just text. It was also really noticeable at thin/narrow lines such as when doing CAD or between cells in spreadsheets.
It will take so long for burn in that you probably want to buy something new anyway.
My LG OLED 4k tv is by far the best picture I ever had.
My Samsung 4k 27" gaming OLED is beautiful when gaming too
https://youtu.be/c90FLTWQiSY
Must say my first generation Samsung display looks amazing both for gaming and programming though. If it wasn’t for the annoying smart-tv stuff, and the mini connectors, it’s a perfect monitor.
> Within the past few weeks LG has announced RGB stripe OLED panels which will resolve this problem, but there aren’t currently any monitors available using these panels
with two links to five known upcoming devices.
https://news.lgdisplay.com/en/2025/12/lg-display-unveils-wor...
https://www.analyticsinsight.net/news/ces-2026-first-rgbstri...
3440x1440 @ 34" (110ppi): Asus PG34WCDN, Asus XG34WCDMS, MSI MEG X, MSI MPG 341CQR X36
Digging into this further, I also found another Asus panel that's closer, if not all the way there yet (5K would be, but this is 4K) to the usual Mac pixel densities:
3840x2160 @ 27" (163ppi): Asus PG27UCWM
I'll still be waiting for 5K @ 27" with the new tech, but I'm really glad to see they finally solved this!
Here is a more detailed look at several different subpixel arrangements: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/qd-oled-and-woled-fringing-...
And encouragingly both LG and Samsung were demoing RGB (LED-style) arrangements at CES this year.
Meanwhile I’ve got an MSI OLED 32” 240Hz @ 4k monitor which was super expensive but is absolutely incredible. It takes getting used to a monitor that performs a maintenance routine on itself any time you leave it active for more than a few hours. But it’s great for work (with some aggressive zoom levels) and gaming (with some aggressive black point levels).
Are you saying this is a con as it sounds like a pro to me.
The article also compares a budget display Dell S (OLED) vs higher end Dell U.
Off topic, but JFYI, with last year's firmware update (OLED CARE 2.0), you can now delay the refresh notification for up to 24 hours. I haven't seen the notification pop up since updating.
It seems that LCD has long been the best technology for desktop monitors - but interestingly, despite its popularity, may never have been the best technology for TVs. CRT, plasma and now OLED have all had better image quality than contemporary LCDs.
I begin to feel like we may need the equivalent of what audio shops used to have: a listening room with normal furniture and a big switch to test different things, but for eyes not ears.
I only buy s/h Dell monitors 3-5 years behind bleeding edge because I am a cheapskate with old eyes, who can't see past the dust on my glasses anyway. But I genuinely can relate to this problem. It would suck to invest in the best you can afford and find it's not doing what the dollars expect for you.
It doesn’t even need this. The old way of buying stuff was from a shop. With big ticket items you build a relationship with staff and their recommendations helped. Now it’s all shipped or bought from faceless big box stores.
These monitors are great when scaled but have real issues rendering text and other fine details at their native resolution.
I know it's the panel, because I have an office BenQ 21 inch with technology called sth like EyeCare on the side as the second monitor. Compared to the gaming one - it's a balm on my eyes. Sometimes I'd put a document or LLM window there even when the main screen is empty, just because of how nice it feels on the eyes.
Except for few situations where the poor man's HDR does help me see more details in the dark (small edge in multiplayer), I believe that I would be better off with a monitor engineered for office work.
Think about it, I got lured by all the gaming hype, but what I really needed is a monitor that is 80% office and 20% gaming, not 100% gaming. And I believe that's the case with others complaining about the eye strain.
Moisturizing eye drops and Safeeyes (eye exercising Linux app) help a lot though. Safeeyes has an alternative on Mac called EyeLeo (but never used that). Recommend them both to everyone in this thread. Take care of your eyes. They are the most suspectable to drying part of our body - eye exercises help for that. And they are fed with only a miniscule artery, eye exercises help keep a good throughput on that too.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/OLED-with-true-RGB-LG-and-Samsu...
Which is why I ended up buying a replacement 24" 1920x1080 recently. I needed pixels large enough to distinguish with my fave small font. If I want more pixels at once on the screen I need a larger screen.
But OLED is a remarkably personal technology. Some people also have issues with how the images are "strobed" during upgrades, etc.
But fret not, they announced at CES there will be OLED with vertical pixel arrangements really soon.
The tradeoff is worth it in a lot of scenarios, but I've been thinking about getting a "coding only" monitor that I use for long sessions instead.
I used an LG C2 42" as a monitor for a few years. The color fringing was particularly bad for me because I like yellow text and LG uses RWBG. 4K 42" and 1440p 27" are about 110 DPI. This is not enough. 4K 27" is about 160 DPI. That is enough. We've already pushed past needing to care about subpixel layouts if you properly weight pixel density in your selection.
OTOH the OLED panels on Apple's iPad Pro series are outstanding, and I'm excited for them to come to MacBooks. Yet another example of Apple's hardware team taking its time to do things right.
> but as noted we found this quite obvious to the eye as well
... and then 2 images that look exactly the same to me :(
> but sir, what about fringing
Skill issue. Just configure your text rendering correctly.
> but sir, what about burn-in
Didn't happen to me.
I have at least one friend who wants individually-addressible bayer layouts, but that likely won't happen.
The display the author doesn't like is a specific model Dell QD-OLED with a sub pixel arrangement that causes a fringe above / below text.
There are macro screenshots that reveal the sub pixel details of a preferred LCD compared the disliked Dell OLED, and it's easy to agree with the author's discontentment.
But the categorical complaint about "OLED" is an over generalization.
Treat the report as a warning to investigate the sub pixel characteristics of any monitor you may be considering.
Yeah, I've had subpixel antialiasing disabled for a long time, since before my first OLED; I prefer grayscale antialiasing.
While the author's complaint is perfectly valid, in practice the advantages of even current OLEDs - for me - far outweigh any disadvantages due to subpixel layout fringing and everything else. Even for programming, the lack of backlight and resulting infinite contrast makes such a huge difference in my day to day life that I refuse to use a non-OLED monitor anymore for any purpose whatsoever. Heck it could be half the DPI and I'd still go for OLED anytime.
The only reason LCDs still exist is price, nothing else.
I'd been having an issue with a vertical dark bar during wakeup for a few months, but it'd go away after the whole screen came up so I pushed off opening a case. Then one day the whole thing started having problems.
[1] https://youtu.be/JtbTQ4ldSkI
It’s in fact most, if not all of the PC display OLEDs on the market today because they almost all use non standard subpixel arrangements, but will change soon with the introduction of newer generation panels.
> But the categorical complaint about "OLED" is an over generalization
It’s really not, given again we are talking about the majority of PC OLEDs in production today having subpixel layouts that cause issues for users with text rendering.
ms cleartype isn’t always compatible with oled.
The OP seems to have a problem not only with fonts but also with straight lines in CAD.
It's a problem with how this subpixel problem aligns with my use (mostly static content with high contrast edges) at the display scaling I'm using.
It just doesn't work for me, so until I can get a more traditional pixel pattern OLED at a price I'm willing to pay I'll just go back to LCD.
He bought a factory defective monitor. LCDs like this exist, Samsung sold them as AMOLEDS called Pentile. They are hideous.
Until subpixel is eradicated from existence, we shall continue to suffer this.
The problem is such:
1) Windows exists.
2) Windows invented Cleartype for Vista, it was ugly and fringed hard because they misunderstood human perception, the sRGB standard, and math.
3) Windows then readjusted Cleartype for DirectWrite. OSX before Retina and Freetype use subpixel tuning also compatible with human perception, sRGB, and math.
4) Many applications on Windows do not know how to ask Windows what the subpixel orientation is; either they assume RGB all the time (do not do this!) or they only read the first monitor (do not do this!). Windows can tell you per monitor, this is the only correct way. This API has existed since Vista.
5) This problem also effects DPI: they either cannot scale or only scale for the first monitor. Windows scaling for you causes _exceptionally bad_ color fringing for subpixel rendering. Again, the API for that has existed since Vista.
6) Many monitors do not list their subpixel orientation in their EDID. Ones that do and also are rotation sensitive do not set their EDID for RGB->VRGB->BGR->VBGR as you rotate them. Windows assumes RGB for any monitor missing that EDID field.
7) Windows only knows (V)RGB and (V)BGR. It does not know W+RGB, it doesn't know any sort of complex multi-row arrangement (such as Pentile).
8) Many applications ignore your Cleartype settings in Windows, and use RGB at default color weights no matter what you do, even if you turn subpixel off and do greyscale only.
9) And the worst sin of all: people embed screenshots in their documentation and websites, and they never update them. The Internet is full of Vista-era fringe-filled Cleartype text. This ties into 5, but is worth mentioning as its own.
Edit: On second reading, the author says they're on a Mac. Macs don't have subpixel rendering anymore. I don't understand the author's complaint, they have greyscale and avoid all these problems.
I will bitch about Apple's mistakes over the past decade, but removing subpixel rendering from their ecosystem was a smart move: makes all their text rendering compatible with all future monitors forever, and moving to HiDPI eliminates the need for it anyways.