Monday, February 14th 2022
Alienware's 34-inch QD-OLED Monitor Gets a Price
Remember that 34-inch QD-OLED monitor that Alienware announced at CES earlier this year? The company has finally worked out how much it's going to charge for it, although there is still no fixed availability date. At US$1,299 the AW3423DW is going to be a $100 pricier than the AW3821DW, which sports a 38-inch Nano IPS panel with a resolution of 3840x1600, rather than the 34-inch QD-OLED panel with a resolution of 3440x1440 of the AW3423DW.
Obviously the two display technologies aren't comparable, but it's at least an indication of how pricy QD-OLED will be initially, compared to more traditional display technologies. Both displays feature G-Sync Ultimate, so it's not as if Dell has tried to cut any corners here. The AW3423DW does offer a higher refresh rate of 175 Hz vs 144 Hz for the AW3821DW, which may be an advantage to some, but the official HDR certification is oddly enough only HDR 400 vs HDR 600, despite the fact that Dell claims it can deliver up to 1000 cd/m². That said, the black levels of the AW3423DW should be vastly superior, as should the colour gamut. The display is said to be available sometime early this spring, presumably in the US market first.
Sources:
@Alienware, via TFT Central
Obviously the two display technologies aren't comparable, but it's at least an indication of how pricy QD-OLED will be initially, compared to more traditional display technologies. Both displays feature G-Sync Ultimate, so it's not as if Dell has tried to cut any corners here. The AW3423DW does offer a higher refresh rate of 175 Hz vs 144 Hz for the AW3821DW, which may be an advantage to some, but the official HDR certification is oddly enough only HDR 400 vs HDR 600, despite the fact that Dell claims it can deliver up to 1000 cd/m². That said, the black levels of the AW3423DW should be vastly superior, as should the colour gamut. The display is said to be available sometime early this spring, presumably in the US market first.
135 Comments on Alienware's 34-inch QD-OLED Monitor Gets a Price
Personally I have always been hesitant on ultra wide... I think I will wait until next year before i upgrade my monitor... maybe LG C3 32" OLED or 42" if they don't do 32"... or wait for a sale on this Alienware OLED.
@zlobby do you think the minimal PWM flicker would affect us with our eye issue on these Alienware OLED's? Apparently they are different than LG OLED tv's. it still has some according to rtings, but maybe it is handled in a different way?
PWM is effectively a strobing. I am consciously and subconsciously affected by it.
The only 'different' way of handling it is to entirely disable it for higher brightness levels.
Some say that boosting the strobing frequency makes it less noticeable but not to me. For better or worse I can see and feel it.
maybe Best Buy will have it on display someday, and I can try it out for 20-30 minutes, and see if it messes with me eyes or not, my OLED phone does. burn in of lines in my vision for a good 1-2 minutes. really annoying. probably not good for long term health of my eyes either.
PWM flicker did bother me a little on my Sony 40" LED TV from 2015. But with the LG OLED, even BFI is not a problem for me and I only notice flicker on a white screen (so almost never).
Though I do use glasses with anti-blue-light lenses, which definitely lower the strain on my eyes.
This is the basis behind Samsung's implementation of OLED. They use a matrix/canvas'ey solution on top of a self emissive diode. Its the reason for all the properties those panels have. Is it inferior, not sure, but definitely closer in properties to a good ol' LCD than LG's OLED implementation and certainly cheaper to produce. With its pro's and cons. For gaming or PC use, Samsung's implementation is clearly inferior in ways: display of text is horrible (fringing/halo effects) because of the subpixel orientation, and latency is higher than on OLED because of, most likely, processing of the image. OTOH, its likely to degrade less quickly as there is only one color of OLED (blue), but we can't tell just yet.
LG OLED is a true self emissive, individual diode per pixel you're looking at, and Samsung's is not quite that. That's why the Samsung panels haven't got the same static contrast either; they specify 1M:1 static. LG specs for infinite:1 because it is pitch black, the pixel can turn 'off' entirely. The reason is likely some light leakage between diode and canvas on Samsung or not using a single diode per pixel, but rather some idea of local dimming zones; the exact reason LCD's can't do proper blacks. The quantum dot layer is that canvas.
But back to subject: PWM means modulated and it means there is not a truly constant voltage so there can be perceptible flicker, depending on your sensitivity, but it will never help with persistence blur because the interval is too high to create a noticeable lower brightness - there are no black frames in PWM modulated panels. That is, at first impression what BFI does: lower the brightness because you're really getting X frames per second but with black doubled frames in between, the result is, your eyes catch only half the light, or a bit more, and your brain interprets those black frames as a way to 'frame' moving images. Its simply a slideshow at high speed. PWM modulating does not create that effect at all.
This is also the reason BFI in (LG) OLED is never an issue wrt perceptible flicker. There is no 'black frame insertion', there are just pixels turning off. A black frame on LCD is not 'an off state', its brightness at 0%, which at best gets you a black level of 0.02 cd/m2 or something on the best VA's.
I object to the notion that these are more like LCD than OLED. LCDs control luminance by aligning liquid crystals to block/filter light, while QD-OLED does no such thing. Subpixel output is controlled purely by modulating the voltage being sent to each subpixel. Blue light is emitted by the blue OLED material, then it is converted to either red or green by quantum dots (or is allowed to pass as blue). Quantum dots are a passive color converter--their output is determined by the intensity of the input, so the OLED subpixels have to have their voltages individually controlled in order to deliver the desired RGB values. The idea that the light source works in zones and can't be controlled on a per-pixel level is pure nonsense. In comparison, LG OLED has a uniform white OLED layer (RGB stacked on top of each other) and passes the light from that through red, green, and blue light filters (with a fourth white subpixel). I don't really see how QD-OLED is different, other than using a more efficient form of light conversion (quantum dots are far more efficient than light filters since quantum dots convert and filters... filter).
Samsung is planning a number of improvements to the manufacturing process that will bring even better results over the next few years, and one of the most important one of these is switching from a dual-substrate process to a single-substrate process. Currently, QD-OLED works by applying the OLED material to one substrate, quantum dots and polarizing filters to another substrate, and then bonding them together. Perhaps this is what you meant by "matrix and canvas," though the "canvas" layer is really just the quantum dots and some basic filters. When switching to a single-substrate process, the quantum dots and polarizing layer are going to be deposited directly on top of the oled material. The new process is expected to allow for increased pixel density (4K desktop monitors and 8K TVs will be possible), and it also will enable them to do ordinary RGB stripe subpixels, which eliminate all color fringing. If there is any light bleed currently happening in the second substrate layer, that will be gone too.
Color fringing can happen around text on LG OLED too, by the way, since no text renderer understands how to use a WBGR subpixel layout.