Comment by brokencode

Comment by brokencode 3 hours ago

8 replies

Just curious in case somebody knows. Are OLED displays in laptops bad at low light? He cites that as a reason he doesn’t want OLED, but I’ve never noticed such a problem on OLED phones.

Normal_gaussian 2 hours ago

I'm using an OLED X1 Carbon right now in the UK. I use it all the time in low light.

I just turned all the lights off (even the Christmas tree) and ran through a handful of usage situations and couldn't see any issues. I turned some lights on and did the same, I couldn't see any issues. I asked Claude, and got told to do the finger test, and that is barely perceptible. I then used my phone to record the screen and yes - I can confirm that there is an effect that my pixel 9a's camera picks up, barely noticeable at 240Hz, and definitely noticeable at 480Hz.

Maybe the guy is particularly sensitive, but from the framing of the rest of the article I think he's blowing a few things out of proportion.

  • YorickPeterse an hour ago

    I probably should've done a better job at clarifying this, but my issue with OLEDs isn't just that (at least historically) they tend to be too bright even at lower brightness, but also the other issues they come with such as burn-in and text potentially looking less pleasant compared to IPSs displays. Burn-in is probably my biggest concern here, especially since it really seems to be a case of winning the lottery or not (i.e. for some it's fine for years, others get burn-in after just a few months).

    Basically I just trust IPS more than any other technology :)

    • Frotag 2 minutes ago

      I've only recently bought OLED laptops so I can't speak to burn-in but out of the three I've tested, they have a lower minimum brightness than my other IPS laptops.

      In terms of text clarity, "2k" OLEDs (1920x1200) are a bit blurry. IPSs and 3k OLEDs are about the same and noticeably sharper.

ndiddy 2 hours ago

A lot of computers with OLED displays use PWM for the low brightness levels, and he seems like the type of person who would be sensitive to that sort of thing.

  • jeffbee 21 minutes ago

    PWM is the only useful way to drive an LED and the people who deny this are, to me, hilarious. In fact for the author's stated use case of low light conditions PWM really is the only way to do it without wrecking accuracy (and efficiency).

piskov 2 hours ago

OLED phones are bad because of flicker

  • antonkochubey 2 hours ago

    On iPhones at least you can disable PWM dimming at lower brightness level at the expense of color accuracy. It's in Accessibility/Display settings.

    • piskov an hour ago

      Now tell me a model which has this given that OLEDs are here since iPhone X

      Hint: the only one was released in a year that ends with 25