OLED Burn-in?

[David M]

I remember reading people sitting out the last 3-4 years of Plasma, because OLED was just around the corner. The first few years of OLED had real performance issues with near-black uniformity, edge vignetting and color accuracy, most of which were under-reported in reviews because people were too happy to have true zero blacks. It took a few years to get really good.

[Geoff D]

Yep yep yep. That's why I've not yet gone OLED because there was far too much of The Emperor's New Clothes going on; the blacks may have been "perfect" but everything else? Noooope. I can't blame people for being happy with it in the same way that LCD is still the leading mass market option despite it's myriad problems, but it was almost like some mass delusion was happening. The marketing did its job brilliantly, and as you say it didn't help that even the reviewing cognoscenti didn't want to play up these issues with OLED lest they be seen as heretics, though to be fair to HDTVtest you/they have been referencing OLED's near black issues for years in the reviews. The near black stuff alone would've driven me up the fookin wall.

But things are changing, driven in part by the addition of Sony and Pannysonic's expertise which has forced LG to up their game.

[oddbox83]

Pick your poison. The top end TVs still have trade-offs on what their weakness is depending which you go for.

I’m still glad I got my B8 though. That IMO was the peak of the lower priced B-series. They seem to have gone backwards since on stuff like peak brightness.

My colour banding issue has vanished which makes it look like it was just a temporary side effect of a screen refresh cycle.

[Geoff D]

Sure, I mean I literally acknowledged LCD's "myriad" of problems. But it was the hardcore pixel peepers being either unwilling or unable to acknowledge what was going on with OLED that baked my gourd, years ago I remember arguing with people on AVF who were insistent that their amazingly superior OLEDs were simply exposing crap buried in the signal w/ref to near-black junk and that it was nothing to do with the TV tech/processing itself. Just...no.

[Vilya]

^Once a heretic, always a heretic. Make peace with it.

[oddbox83]

I still think there’s not much to choose between OLED and FALD-LED. You just go for what you want more in a TV.

OLED might have been struggling at the beginning, but FALD was also having teething problems too in crushing blacks a bit too vigorously. Fanboys in both camps would downplay the issues, not just the OLED ones.

[NeilZ]

There's a lot to be said for perfect blacks though. I can say from experience as an LCD user, watching films in the dark is a real pain. It's hard not to look at black bars that just stand out as gray bars, and on most sets you'll also see some kind of glow in the corners, it's all distracting and I'd take some near black issues over these.

I'm on the market for this years OLED's because of the promise of finally reaching 1000 nits (the magic number in my book).

I am concerned about burn in though as I play a lot of games, but from what I read so long as you don't play the same game for several hundreds of hours it's not really an issue. people who seem to develop burn in from huds seem to get it from playing the same game for many hundreds, if not thousands of hours (such as with Destiny, or MMO RPG's etc). I read consecutively or not makes no difference, as it's total accumulation that matters with OLED burn in.

[oddbox83]

Oh yes, very distracting, especially on edge-lit IPS and larger screens.

My suffering of an edge-lit IPS LG with awful uniformity and dimming was the reason I got an OLED as my main TV.

Later on I got a smaller VA edge-lit Panasonic LED for the loft, and that is much better than that old LG IPS monstrosity I mention above. So much so I've turned it's primitive dimming off as it's more uniform despite slightly raised blacks without.

I'm so impressed with both the built quality and what that little Panasonic LED does under the hood despite it's screen technology limitations, I'd get an OLED from them if I was to buy one all over again for the main TV. Because where my LG OLED really lets itself down is the motion handling. I know LG have made a big improvement to that on the CX but Panasonic (and Sony) have mastered good motion among other things on their flagships way sooner.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by oddbox83

I still think there’s not much to choose between OLED and FALD-LED. You just go for what you want more in a TV.

OLED might have been struggling at the beginning, but FALD was also having teething problems too in crushing blacks a bit too vigorously. Fanboys in both camps would downplay the issues, not just the OLED ones.

Samsungs were/are the worst for crushing blacks in an effort to tamp down backlighting problems, but then LG wasn't above doing something similar with their 'fix' for the chroma overshoot problem on some generations of OLED, they just crushed the blacks a bit.

Originally Posted by NeilZ

There's a lot to be said for perfect blacks though. I can say from experience as an LCD user, watching films in the dark is a real pain. It's hard not to look at black bars that just stand out as gray bars, and on most sets you'll also see some kind of glow in the corners, it's all distracting and I'd take some near black issues over these.

I'm on the market for this years OLED's because of the promise of finally reaching 1000 nits (the magic number in my book).

I am concerned about burn in though as I play a lot of games, but from what I read so long as you don't play the same game for several hundreds of hours it's not really an issue. people who seem to develop burn in from huds seem to get it from playing the same game for many hundreds, if not thousands of hours (such as with Destiny, or MMO RPG's etc). I read consecutively or not makes no difference, as it's total accumulation that matters with OLED burn in.

I can only reiterate that the Sony ZD9 is incredibly good at managing that stuff. Black bars stay jet black, white on black credits look phenomenal, and this is from always watching in a darkened room. It's a beast. What lets it down occasionally is fading up or down from black with only a few tiny sources of light on screen, it can spaz out the backlighting algo. The opening shot of Life on UHD as it fades up into the starfield, holy shit, light blobbing all over the place. The starfield itself is fine, as good as any FALD LCD could manage without crushing away the smaller points (see above), but dat fade up is horrendous because the algo can't track all those stars.

It happens very rarely (I've yet to come across anything as insanely awful as that bit from Life) and I guess the same could be said for OLED's near black blocking/pulsing which is also why it hasn't become a bigger issue, but when balancing the two trade-offs I went with the one that gives me almost perfick blacks, 13 'stops' of range (it's not an 'infinite' amount of range but then what content actually has 'infinite' range?) and almost 2000 nits of brightness.

OLED's getting closer though, my word is it getting closer. Near black mostly under control, >1000 nit specular brightness, burn-in/retention becoming even less of an issue thanks to the heatsink, greatly improved tone mapping. Everything I wanted to get sorted has been, but niggles still remain like the frame skipping on Pannysonic's sets and I cannae bring myself to take the ZD9 down to the woodshed and put a bullet in its T-con just yet.