I’ve been whining about PC monitors for two years but looks like the tide is finally changing. PC monitors are getting better and cheaper at a very fast pace and finally I’ve decided to buy an ASUS PG32UQX. It’s a 1152 zone, 1600 nit peak brightness, 1200 nit @ 100% window Mini-LED display with quantum dot technology to boost the color gamut. So basically a top tier model when I bought it three months ago, but now we have some better options. This is how fast things are changing.
Now I finally have a chance to see some MiniLED vs OLED side-by-side comparison with my own eyes, I have to admit that I was wrong about several things in the past.
The biggest advantage compared to OLED is that miniLED can maintain its brightness when the scene is overall bright. I’ve argued that in most movie scenes the ADL (average display level) is very low so you can’t utilize this advantage that much. This is indeed true for movie watching, mostly. However, when a rare high ADL scene actually poped up on my screen, I was very impressed by how much better it looked compared to an OLED:
The yellow sand is more yellow and the blue sky is more blue, not because they’re more saturated but rather they’re more bright.
I tried to find more scenes where miniLED can totally trash OLED like this but didn’t have a lot of luck. Unlike Aquaman, most movies don’t have a lot of high ADL daylight scenes to embarrass the OLEDs. Why is that? When you start to ask the correct question the answer is actually quite obvious. Movies are originally played by projectors, which strugles even more in a high ADL scene. So in the shooting stage or post-processing stage, filmmakers will always try to avoid any scenario that gives the projector a hard time. And if a projector can handle it, then of course an OLED can do it only better.
So movie scenes having lower ADL is not how things naturally are, but rather it’s the display media that defines how the content is created. It’s like if there ain’t no HDR TVs then there won’t be any HDR movies either. Let’s say miniLED can be even more HDR than your ordinary HDR, but the movie industry hasn’t really caught up yet.
On the other hand, we don’t really have to wait for them to make more Aquaman. As photographers we can create our own contents. And that’s when miniLEDs truly blowed my mind. Here is an example:
No matter how hard I work on this photo it’s just nowhere near what I saw in real life. The mountain was gleaming when I pressed the shutter. How do you expect your 300 nit display to replicate that visual wonder of a mountain that can cause actual snow blindness? Maybe my skills are not good enough but here is the thing… when you have a miniLED you don’t need the skills. I didn’t even have to touch the shadow/highlight sliders in Lightroom, just adjust the exposure a little bit and the photo already looks real and natural. The mountains are shiny again.
I did a lot of experiments and found that those photos with super high dynamic range and your wife’s face inside (so you have to ignore everything else and nail the skin tone first) that I couldn’t handle well before just automatically look good on a miniLED. The traditional wisdom says a good photographer should avoid certain light condition to get good photos, but with a miniLED it’s like I don’t care anymore. As long as the scene is good to my own eyes in the real world and gives me the urge to capture the moment, then it’s going to be good on my miniLED, with minimum adjustment.
And as a proud OLED owners, I’m sorry to say that OLED just can’t do that when the ADL is high. If you took you photo when the sun is high, then the ADL is probably also very high.
So… enough with how amazing it is. Now let’s talk about the shortcomings:
Blooooooooooooooooming
Honestly blooming is not a real issue for me. Although you can see a shit load of blooming in Windows environment because a lof of website/software have dark background while the mouse is white, honestly I don’t really give a fuck about that, why should I care about blooming when browsing the internet? And OLED has its own issue in the opposite way: when the background is white, everything looks so horribly dark.
I’ll be more pissed if there is blooming in the movies, and surprisingly… there isn’t a lot, especially in the modern ones. Those space sci-fi like Moonfall, Gravity, Star Wars 789 etc do not use pure black in the space scenes. The black level is always a bit lifted. This is also the same for those dark toned movies like The Batman. The background is visibly brighter than the upper/bottom black bars.
There are few exceptions like 2001: A Space Odyssey, the white is eye-blinding white and the black is shut-off-the-fucking-pixel-black. But honestly that’s a movie dated back to the 60s. The visual style has changed because frankly, these super-black-super-white contrasty scenes are never visually appealling to begin with, even on an OLED. Generally I’m OK with it. The miniLED is good when it matters, and bad when it doesn’t. I’m happy to live with that.
Now I’m going to talk about the real issue:
Microsoft/Adobe
The funny/sad thing is that at the moment Adobe can only do HDR video editing but not HDR photo editing. If you want to do HDR photo editing then you have to use a smartphone, which sounds absolutely stupid. And even if there is a way to edit the photo, it can’t be properly displayed in Windows, not without a lot of hassles. So the brightness of a photo can only reach the display’s SDR brightness capped by the manufacturer, in most cases around 500 nit for a miniLED. Good, but not amazing.
The good news is that there are workaround to let you utilize the full potential of your miniLEDs. The bad news is that they’re not permanent and cause some other annoying issues for your other user cases like web browsing or making PowerPoints. So unless you’re willing to switch the display settings manually all the time, HDR photo editing is officially still not a thing.
So if your main purpose is to make some nice photos that you can only enjoy on your own monitor then I guess the time hasn’t come yet. Too bad because I certainly feel that the hardware is already available and affordable. Anyway, here are the current trends right now.
Cheaper & Better MiniLED Monitors
There are some crazily cheap miniLEDs from KTC/CoolerMaster at the moment and one of them is especially noteworthy, the Philips 27B1U7903. The full white brightness can reach a whooping 2000 nit. It also has 2300 dimming zones and all the bells and whistles, yet this little beast is listed below 7000 CNY on Taobao right now, so slightly above $1000. The main shortcoming is the 60Hz refresh rate which I don’t care. This price performance ratio is just unimaginable a year ago and it’s certainly the best option if you don’t mind the 27″ size.
The <$2000 1000+ dimming zones AOC PD32M can also reach 1800 nit full white and it’s a 144Hz monitor in case you’re also a gamer. But unlike Philips, it seems like AOC did a very poor job on the local dimming algorithm and some other stuff based on some early user reports. I don’t know how bad it actually is though.
There are a lot of stuff that’s already announced but not on market yet due to this and that, including a new 32 inch HDR1400 panel with 2300 zones (HDR1400 is the highest certification you can get so it could be even brighter). All in all, you can see that things are getting much better now even though Apple has disappointed us with that heinous $1600 no HDR stupid display.
MiniLED Monitor vs MiniLED TV
The full white brightness of most MiniLED TVs are capped at around 700 nits with few exceptions, while new PC monitor panels are already aiming at at least 1000 or even 2000 nits, and the gamut is often larger. Given the mainstream size (27 or 32 inches) is also more suitable for photo editing or PC uses in general, I think the “wait for a good 42″ OLED/QLED TV to replace the monitor” days are officially over now.
OLED Monitors vs OLED TV
The biggest difference of OLED monitors is that they use RGB sub-pixels instead of WRGB so it can show brighter colors than a conventional OLED. And although the peak brightness isn’t so impressive (500~600 nit) the ABL is not as bad as an OLED TV. The 32 inch JOLED can maintain its 500 nit brightness in a 50% window. Previously the thing that turned me down is that the asking price is around $4000. That’s just ridiculous. Now it’s occasionaly on sale for $1500 so of course my opinion has changed. But after all, it’s no miniLED. 500 nit @ 50% window is like 2 stops darker than the Philips. That’s a huge gap. And there are also other issues, such as in Windows or a PC game there are often icons fixed in one location which triggers the anti-burn-in algorithm, so generally I don’t think OLED is the best choice for a PC monitor.
QD-OLED: The New Cool Kid?
QD-OLED also uses RGB pixels. The full white brightness is still only around 200 nit so I don’t think it’s that much better for high ADL scenes. Essentially it’s still a more advanced OLED so I don’t think things are going to be drastically different. Also there are only three sizes at the moment where 55&65 are just too big and they fucked up the 34″ version pretty badly, so at least in 2022 QD-OLED is not really on my list.
I think, all we have to do right now, is to insult Adobe/Microsoft everyday until they implement some proper HDR support!
Photo Engineering 