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  • sleepeeg3 - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    This sounds awesome! It's about time. After PC laptops suffered through years of awful 1366x768 TN displays, they finally start making exponential leaps from HD IPS panels to 4K OLED! If any displays needed improved PPI, it was most definitely laptops. Much more productive to use, when you can cram in more content, while actually having the contrast and resolution to see it.
  • ajp_anton - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    "features very advanced specs"
    "a dynamic contrast ratio of 120,000:1"

    Something's not right here.
  • boozed - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    Notwithstanding the calculation error (based on the figures quoted, it should be 1,200,000:1), is the marketing term "dynamic contrast ratio" even meaningful for OLED? Isn't that just its standard contrast ratio, without any trickery?
  • Santoval - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link

    I believe you are correct. OLED panels have no need for "dynamic contrast ratio" BS, so that must be static contrast ratio.
  • philehidiot - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link

    Shouldn't OLEDs theoretically have an infinite contrast ratio as black is off and therefore zero? Or do they measure scatter, reflection and refraction and so on within the screen?
  • iwod - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    Burn -In?
    PWM?
  • sleepeeg3 - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    Has that ever been a problem? Millions of phones would say, "no."

    Never fails - there are always people trying to bring down better display technologies like plasma or OLED, all in the name of defending their craptacular tech that they bought to save a few $.

    Average person spends probably 8 hours / day staring at a screen. That's 1/3 of your life. Buy something easy on your eyes.
  • name99 - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    I get where you are coming from. But different use cases are different.

    It's pretty much impossible (and there's very little demand) to hack a phone to keep the screen on and displaying the same static content for hours on end. Whereas there are use cases (and it's generally just a trip to the Settings app) for setting up a laptop that behaves this way.

    Compare, eg, the Tesla. I don't know what tech that screen is, but burn-in on Tesla screens (especially the menu bar area) is not uncommon.
    Maybe Tesla just didn't care? But more likely, I suspect, is that they figured the tech they're using worked fine on tablets, so what's the difference? Didn't take into account:
    (a) car can be much hotter for a long time (I don't know if that's relevant)
    (b) car screen is on, with unchanging image (especially the menu bar) for hours on end, day after day (I'm sure this is VERY relevant).
  • Byte - Tuesday, January 29, 2019 - link

    I see samsung phones all day long with SBI. I guess they crash a lot and stuck screen.
  • philehidiot - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link

    A friend of mine used an S7 as a satnav for long distance and got quite bad screen burn. I gave him my old M9 with an LCD screen to use for the purpose.

    As for heat, he was also charging the phone at the same time and noted it got very hot. Possibly a factor as above.
  • ikjadoon - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    Oh, come on. Laptop OLEDs have notoriously struggled against traditional LCDs. OLED in laptops is as useless a buzzword as NVMe these days. NVMe is no guarantee of performance; OLED in a laptop is no guarantee of performance.

    1) Battery life: almost always significantly worse with OLED because the web and most desktop applications have higher APLs.

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/10697/the-lenovo-th...

    2) Poor quality OLEDs vs high-quality LTPS panels: the LTPS panels win.

    https://hothardware.com/reviews/lenovo-thinkpad-x1...

    >As you can see, though again the Canon 80D camera even masks some of the detail, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th Gen machine outperforms even the OLED display of the ThinkPad X1 Yoga. This is a major accomplishment in our estimation, as this laptop OLED panel is one of our favorite premium laptop panels to date.

    3) Burn-in is absolutely a concern. Lenovo shipped "OLED Panel Management" software with their X1 OLEDs that did...obvious things like dimming the taskbar, setting shorter display timeouts, and dimming your wallpaper.

    //

    Now, I'm all for newer generations and continuous improvement through design iterations going to market -> feedback -> going to market cycles. But, it's all right to draw the line at OLED.

    You should pick the best display you can when you buy a laptop; but "best" doesn't necessarily mean "easy on your eyes". Best can damn well mean "lasts me the whole bloody day."
  • ikjadoon - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    Lenovo's OLED longevity and battery life mitigation software: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Lap...
  • p1esk - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    You forgot PWM, which for some is the biggest problem with OLED screens.
    https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2018/10/iphone-xs-pwm-d...
  • MarcusMo - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link

    PWM is not an OLED necessity. It all depends on implementation. The galaxy s9 uses PWM dimming for anything less than 100% brightness. The iPhone XS on the other hand does not use PWM above 50% brightness.

    At a certain point you’ll have to choose between uniformity and flickering. OLEDs driven at a low current will exacerbate any manufacturing variances, yielding weird patterns and artifacts.

    Given this, I think apples approach is a decent compromise. Using PWM all the way isn’t. It reeks of laziness.

    We’ll see what dimming method the implementations of this display will use, but I’m not getting my hopes up. In all likelihood, they’ll use it in the cheapest possible way, while still being able to slap the “4k HDR OLED” lable on it.
  • ajp_anton - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    The high APL is a bad argument, because with LCD's, the APL is basically always 100%, because the backlight lights up everything. In fact, it's 200%, because the polarization filter automatically removes half the light, always.

    What you should say instead is just that OLED is a lot less energy efficient as a light source as the LED's used as the backlight in most LCD's. And I'd like to have an explanation on why this is... Maybe Micro-LED will fix this problem?
  • MarcusMo - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link

    I’m certainly no expert, but my guess as to why leds are more efficient than oled is that of all scalability; a few big light sources are more efficient than millions of small.
  • ikjadoon - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    Sorry; Anandtech doesn't have notifications for comments.

    APL is a software methodology measurement (% of the screen displaying white)...it's not related to the display technology. The Web has a high APL (since most websites use white or white-ish) backgrounds. 50% APL means roughly half the screen is white. If your use-case is high APL, a comparable OLED vs LCD matchup will show the LCD with much longer battery life. Anandtech has tested this (see their Lenovo X1 OLED reviews).

    The explanation, grossly simplified: to display colors, LCDs re-arrange their crystals to "transparent" so the white backlight shines through. LCDs don't change battery life depending on the color displayed. It's always the same power.

    OLEDs, instead, light individual subpixels (often RGB) and thus different colors have different power consumption. Displaying red uses only 1 subpixel, while white requires 3 subpixels. That means displaying pure RGB colors use roughly 1/3 the power, displaying white uses all the subpixels and all the power, and displaying black uses no subpixels and greatly reduced power.

    The unfortunate reality: 3 subpixels on OLED consume more than 1 pixel on LCD. So if you just displayed an all-white screen, OLED would murder your battery (like, 50% shorter battery life, if not much more)

    This explanation is grossly oversimplified, but it works. (FWIW, LCDs also use subpixels, but they're not individually lit, so they all get lumped together for power comparisons).
  • ikjadoon - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    MicroLED fixing the issue: only if 1 pixel's worth of microLEDs use less power than one LCD pixel when displaying white (white is the worst for all emissive technologies, IIRC, as white requires all subpixels/microLEDs to be on).

    Say 9 microLEDs power a single pixel on a microLED display. To display white, it'll need to power all 9 microLEDs. Each microLED here would need to use less than 11% power of a full LCD pixel (who can display white, green, purple, etc. at a constant power rate).

    I'm all for microLED taking over; hopefully, Samsung et al. release them ASAP. OLED sorely needs competition to drive down pricing!
  • kaidenshi - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    > "Has that ever been a problem? Millions of phones would say, "no.""

    And millions more said "yes". The Samsung S4 Active was a big one; that screen ended up with taskbar burn-in within weeks of first use. Several HTC One SKUs with OLED screens suffered similar fates.

    OLED has improved, but the fact that in 2019 Lenovo has to ship software to mitigate burn-in on their OLED equipped laptops speaks volumes.

    If you're going to shill, at least try to do your homework first.
  • piroroadkill - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link

    Always. ALL OLED phone screens I've seen have exhibited signs of degradations. Just because you're not looking at it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
  • piroroadkill - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link

    Also, "Never fails - there are always people trying to bring down better display technologies like plasma or OLED".

    Nope, I shit on OLED because it's a technology that degrades rapidly, regardless of what new name they slap on it.
  • Gunbuster - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link

    My phone is one in a million I guess.
  • WatcherCK - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    Im curious how oled equipped will protect head-up-arse users who like to pick their laptops up by their screens (crack...oh ah it just spontaneously cracked not sure why... 🙄) or whether that wont be an issue given how flexible oled tv screens appear to be...
  • willis936 - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    YESYESBISON.avi
  • willis936 - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    That definitely was not meant to be a reply to a comment.
  • Lau_Tech - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link

    Good to see that the market will now have another choice.
  • TristanSDX - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link

    MS will solve buri in problem with 'negative display mode'
  • Gunbuster - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link

    It's going to be funny when the displays are looking straight out of blade runner or a pacman cabinet at year 8 or 10... Oh right they go to the landfill at year 2 anyway...
  • SaturnusDK - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link

    Let me just bury the burn in on laptops debate. I've had an HP Spectre x360 with a 1440p 13.3" OLED display for 2½ years now. After I initially got it I adjust the colour gamut to 100% Adobe RGB enabled dark mode where possible and naturally set it to hide the taskbar. It still is 100% Adobe RGB after 30 months of daily use for at least 10 hours a day, and probably nearing 14 hours per day as it's my daily use laptop. I had the battery replaced for free as part of the HP extended warranty program before the 2 year factory warranty expired but actually had no problems with it at all.
    The key part here is that laptops by default shuts down the screen after a few minutes of not using it. This is done to preserve battery but it at the same time basically all but makes burn in impossible unless you are deliberately turning off all the features that exist to prevent it.
  • heymrdj - Tuesday, January 29, 2019 - link

    But I use my laptop for productivity. I reference the static parts of the screen all day. I'm lucky if I can sleep the screen for 5 minutes every two hours...This may work for your couch surfer who really does fine with a tablet or phone but is using a windows PC, but for the most part Windows PC's (with their start bar at the bottom) are going to need the screen to stay on much longer than that, and not burn in.
  • SaturnusDK - Tuesday, January 29, 2019 - link

    Maybe you didn't understand me correctly. I use it for productivity work pretty much exclusively so yes, the screen doesn't get much rest during the day but it does a few hours each night. And that's the big difference between a laptop use case and the torture burn in tests. OLEDs are organic materials, as long as they're not stressed hard enough for some of the molecules to become inert then it regenerates itself. That the problem with using OLED TV burn in test and extrapolating any result from them to laptop use. It's a vastly different use case.
    On top of that most modern OLED monitor drivers are specifically configured to avoid running the OLED outside it's specifications. On a OLED TV that can be slightly annoying but very few people would enjoy sitting in front of a modern 400+ nits OLED laptop running full brightness at two-three feet distance from the screen if not in direct sunlight.
    And that sends us right back to the typical operating conditions of a laptop, even a work laptop used heavily such as my own there is basically no chance of burn in ever happening unless you put it permanently on power supply, put it permanently on maximum brightness, don't use dark mode to make sure you absolutely stress the screen as much as you can, and then don't turn it off for 2 years like OLED TV burn in tests does.
  • HStewart - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link

    I think the biggest issue with 4k on laptops now - is that consumes a lot of battery life. We are not talking about smaller phone screens here and I thinks it not just number of pixels but also physical size of screen.

    For me 4k on my Dell 15 2in1 is not always needed - but it would be nice if they made it use less power in smaller resolutions. But for me personally, the 2in1 is rarely used with out external monitor and docking station. But it nice to have when I do need.

    Blue screen filters are nice to have also.
  • TEAMSWITCHER - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link

    Avoid like the plague... The Windows Task Bar is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you want on an OLED display. It will likely burn-in the first year. OLED's are a bad, bad idea for any computer usage.
  • SaturnusDK - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link

    The ignorance displayed in this section is staggering. Read my comment above. But to put it very simply, if used within normal operating conditions of a laptop burn in is virtually impossible. My own OLED laptop show no hint of burn in at all after 30 months of heavy use.
  • fred.smith.1234 - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link

    line 7: "considerably more more accurate"
    line 15: "considerably more more accurate"

    Do you even proof read your article?!
  • fred.smith.1234 - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link

    Maybe not seeing how I can't even copy and paste myself!

    line 15: "display to hot the market later".
  • Petersondm - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    How will you tell the differences between the 15" OLED panels offered by each company? Alienware OLED seems to be lowest version when compared to Razer's OLED version. Alienware is HDR100, Not touch screen and Razer's is HDR400, touch screen. It would be interesting to know the hit to battery life as well.
  • ZielonaHerbata - Monday, September 2, 2019 - link

    hyperbook have this display in their laptop sl504. www.hyperbook.pl

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