Summary
- OLED monitors require regular pixel cleaning for burn-in protection, causing interruptions in usage throughout the day.
- Auto-brightness limiter affects overall peak brightness and creates varying pixel brightness issues on OLED panels.
- Text clarity problems in Windows environment are common due to non-RGB subpixel layouts of OLED panels, causing text fringing.
OLED monitors are all the rage right now, with plenty of manufacturers churning out their new monitors featuring OLED panels left, right, and center. That's right, the selection of monitors available on the market has significantly grown over the years, and we're awaiting the next wave of OLED monitors that were showcased at CES earlier this year. The current crop of OLED monitors on the market is also quite impressive, and many of them have received rave reviews from critics.
I recently reviewed one such monitor — the Asus ROG Swift PG27AQDM — to see what the hype is all about, and it ended up getting a recommended badge for everything it had to offer. But as one of the best OLED gaming monitors out there, it also made me experience a thing or two about OLED monitors that are, quite frankly, very annoying.
3 Burn-in protection routines
This pesky keeps showing up!
OLED monitors have a burn-in problem and there are no two ways about it. That's not to say you'll have the Windows taskbar burned into your panel after a year's worth of usage, but you'll eventually get there if you're not taking care of your monitor. That's precisely why manufacturers have come up with different ways of getting around this. One of the ways you can prevent OLED burn-in is with the help of a feature called Pixel Shifting, which is essentially pixel cleaning.
Most — if not all — OLED monitors ship with this pixel cleaning feature that'll constantly remind you to run it. This reminder is enabled by default, and it'll show up on your screen like clockwork, regardless of what you're doing. I've lost count of the times it has showed up when I'm in the middle of a work meeting or an intense gaming session. Yes, you can disable the reminder or set it to show up less frequently (once every 8 hours), but it's not advisable because, well, you might just forget to use the feature and end up damaging your screen in the long run.
Using this feature also means you won't be able to use your screen at all for a few minutes until it finishes. It's not necessarily a deal-breaker for many to not have access to their screens for a few minutes every day, but it's just a hassle and something I never have to deal with a good ol' IPS.
2 Auto-brightness limiter (ABL)
Bet you didn't have to deal with this on an IPS
Another aspect of OLED monitors that you may not know of is the impact the auto-brightness limiter (ABL) might have on how different visuals look on the monitor. ABL, in case you don't know, allocates more power to the pixels in a small bright area on an otherwise dark background, increasing the overall peak brightness of that particular area. Large bright areas on an OLED panel, on the other hand, only get evenly distributed power, meaning those white pixels across the screen appear dimmer than they would've been for smaller white areas.
This phenomenon of varying pixel brightness poses an issue while using these OLED monitors for productivity tasks. I couldn't help but notice the screen brightness constantly changing depending on how much of my screen was bright or how many white pixels covered the screen space. I see how this could be an issue for anyone who uses their gaming monitor for, well, more than just gaming. You can enable a feature called 'Uniform Brightness' to mitigate this issue, but it makes things worse.
Yes, the uniform brightness feature isn't particularly great as it essentially just caps the screen brightness at a level that it can sustain for a full 100% APL (average pixel level), meaning when the entire screen is covered with a bright window of white pixels. That makes the monitor less ideal to be used in a well lit room, where a typical LCD would have no issues whatsoever.
1 Text clarity in Windows desktop environment
Not ideal for productivity
While we're discussing how OLED monitors aren't ideal for office and general productivity use-cases, it's worth mentioning how most OLED monitors, barring a few super high-end JOLED monitors, have text clarity issues. This clarity issue manifests itself as text fringing, making huge walls of text rather unpleasant to read. It's more prominent at lower pixel densities, and I've noticed it on a lot of bigger 1440p monitors. This particular problem is down to the subpixels of OLED panels, as the non-RGB subpixel layout of the popular WOLED and QD-OLED messes with the text clarity on Windows.
LG's WOLED panels have a WRBG sub-pixel layout, which not only introduces a white pixel, but also changes the standard RGB layout with RBG (in that order). QD-OLEDs, while they do have standard RGB subpixels, use a different triangular RGB sub-pixel layout instead of a normal stripe. Both of these layouts don't work great with Windows, causing text and font rendering issues. This isn't necessarily an issue on macOS, but I believe it is safe to assume that most gamers, who these "gaming" monitors are aimed at, are using Windows as their primary operating system for some obvious reason.
The problems are hard to ignore when you pay a premium price
I may end up eating my words as more OLED monitors show up and the technology evolves in the future, but OLEDs just aren't doing it for me right now. Granted, the overall quality is so much better with things like saturated colors and deep blacks, but I simply can't ignore the aforementioned problems. They start to stick out more when I look at the price tags that are associated with these panels in 2024. While I don't mind splurging for a good OLED monitor, I'd rather wait for these panels to fully evolve and reach a point where I wouldn't have to worry about upgrading them very often to get the best experience.