Thursday, January 10th 2019
CES 2019: Alienware Saves the PC Monitor World With a 55" OLED Gaming Monitor
So, that news title may be slightly too flashy for the actual product, but bear with me here: OLED is such an improvement over current mainstream display technologies that its transition to the PC monitor space is one of the most sought-after unicorns in this market. Alienware, via a partnership with LG (that's almost obvious), will be making this particular unicorn come to reality. The Alienware 55 OLED gaming monitor will feature 4K resolution @ 120 Hz, Variable Refresh Rate support via HDMI 2.1 (FreeSync? G-Sync? - all's still up in the air), DisplayPort 1.4, and 98 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 RGB spectrum with a candy of HDR support thrown in the mix.If those specs sound familiar, they are; Alienware is naturally using an LG OLED panel for this product, which the specs, all in the same ballpark of LG's announced products, show. Even the diagonal, so incredibly big by PC monitor standards (unless you count NVIDIA's BFGD displays), is the lowest an LG OLED will go. So, the lack of a TV tuner seems to be one of the signs that points towards this television's classification as a gaming monitor. Whether there are more specific, under the hood improvements for a PC-centric monitor of if this is just a repurposed LG OLED television with Alienware's branding and a gaudy light strip on the back of the monitor isn't a question we're equipped to answer at the moment. However, it has several modes to support different game genres that Alienware says will be optimized for those types of games.
Linus Tech Tips actually recorded the Alienware monitor in-action at 4K resolution, so you can check that video (with YouTube compression, sadly) below.
Source:
Digital Trends
Linus Tech Tips actually recorded the Alienware monitor in-action at 4K resolution, so you can check that video (with YouTube compression, sadly) below.
53 Comments on CES 2019: Alienware Saves the PC Monitor World With a 55" OLED Gaming Monitor
I can already feel my neck hurting just thinking how much I'd have to move my head to actually see it all at arm's length.
p.s. Alienware, how did you solve the icing problem ?... excuse me, the BURN-IN problem.
Can PC monitors only be placed on desks? ;) This is clearly not made for desks as it has 80 ppi, lower than a 24" 1080 monitor (92 ppi).
Curious about the input lag on this one
Moooeehh
mLED needs to HTFU
Practically all solutions, like TV / Projector, have a tuner in it, making it "a TV-like object". And your Internet provider are denouncing people that have Internet access to the government, not an inch of moral, like back in the 40's if you know what I mean. You can add to that another fishy thing : when you buy a TV, you're filed on a national database, telling that you have a TV, and that you must pay.
We have many useful taxes in France whatever people will say, allowing free healthcare of good quality, school for everybody and not bad ones only, help from the country for commuters (like 80% off train tickets), help for kids, help for handicap, etc.
But this one is stupid, and mainly an old tax, maintained and earned by the same people.
To avoid this tax which is quite ridiculous since some of the major show runners earn much more money than in private channels (like 1M€/year, when minimum salary is around 1050€ per month), you need to get rid of any "non-PC" display, and players (DVD, BluRay,etc. even VHS).
My current TV is 42 inches, cost me 300€ 8 years ago, and I'm now paying 140€ / year even if I don't watch TV (I use it for my consoles). Your TV can even be broken, you'll pay.
It drives me crazy that every 2 years, I'm paying again my TV ... for nothing.
This "can be", with big quotes, the reason of such a screen.
Love to see more larger monitors, although will not see me buying a LG Monitor or TV.
Witch ends in an interesting situation where the national broadcaster is technically free, you can go to their web page and stream the three channels they have, complete with foreign programs, free of commercials, or go to their archive spanning several decades back, and watch it all on a computer, for free. The ting that pays for it is all the people that has a device that is capable of receiving the broadcast signal.
I prefer 40"+ but. 55" is good. Just sit away untill comfortable.
I am pretty sure it will have HDMI 2.1, 4K UHD 120Hz means it is based on current year's LG TVs which in turn means it is going to get the same inputs - unless Alienware are complete morons which they are not. All technologies have their respective flaws. OLED picture quality - and HDR capability if we are going with current buzzwords - is simply unrivaled. I have an old-old LG OLED TV. With the usual TV PC input things input lag is in 20-30ms range. This is good enough. The new gen is supposed to have some HDMI 2.1 specific stuff to help with input lag, or with configuring it properly if I read that correctly. Samsung made a huge step forward this year and the result is 75" 4k Micro-LED TV. This is state of the art pixel density for the technology and it is far from production yet. Micro-LED shows huge promise for large TVs but it is not likely to scale down to monitors. And probably not smaller TVs like 55".
I have a first-gen LG OLED TV - new ones are supposed to be better. Temporary burn-in does happen with parts of screen having large-ish static images with saturated colors - my TV box has bright-colored squares in UI and I have left these open for 3-4 hours a couple times. This leaves an ugly visible artefact on the screen for a while. That being said, TV does its anti-burn-in stuff regularly and so far it has cleared up the artefacts enough to not be noticeable. I cannot see any in normal usage - TV, movies, games. I rarely look at screen with entire screen being one colour, maybe I should run monitor test screens just to see if I actually do have some artefacts. I have had gaming sessions of several hours and have not seen any burn-in artefacts from it - even UI/HUD is not static enough and/or not saturated enough.
What prevents my from using TV as a more frequent screen is primarily lack of VRR support. And 60Hz seems too low when switching over from a 165Hz gaming monitor :D
What LCD has over OLED is brightness. This gets paid for in contrast. IPS has 1:1000 contrast, VAs have 1:3000/5000. The only reasonable solution to extend that contrast is FALD which inevitably has halo/blooming issues.
OLED is a conditional choice. If you use the screen in a well-lit room or are worries about retention/burn-in, get LCD (LED, QLED, nano-LED whichever).
When looking at the screen in dark or dim room, OLED dynamic range is very noticeable. Black blacks effectively mean infinite contrast/range.
Just checked for myself it was 1290 kr (outside Oslo).
Does any other TPU members form Europe have a idea what the technicalities for the broadcaster taxes are?
Because if they are like here in Norway (bound to the antenna input) there should be a noticeable market for TVs with only HDMI inputs like the Alienware “monitor” here.
What Samsung sells as QLED benefits from quantum dots and has technical merit. Quantum dots are deployed as a filter above blue LED backlight. The beneficial property of quantum dots used here is to release specific colour of light (red or green depending on type of dot) when any type of light shines on them. Blue LED is most efficient and when coupled with red and green quantum dots above it it results in a spectrum of light coming from this backlight system to be more focused on red, green and blue spots while the usual LED backlight has a nice blue focus but indistinct yellow for the rest (achieved with yellow phosphor). Why is this beneficial? Because there is LCD in front of that backlight with color filters for red, green and blue. There are two benefits here:
- These colors are more clearly and more evenly represented in spectrum resulting in better colors.
- Especially red and green have a higher level from backlight which makes backlight straight out more efficient. On top of that, backlight is blue LED which is inherently more efficient.
This is why these displays both have better colour space coverage and can be brighter. As far as marketing terminology goes the same technology goes by QLED, quantum dot (Samsung) as well as nano-LED (LG).
Technology here is still LCD though. LCD panel is not able to filter all the light coming through it.
This is a high-level description and I am sure someone more intimately knowledgable with the technology can correct me at a number of details but this is the gist of it.
In theory it is possible to use quantum dots in the same way as OLEDs - using these are light emitters not just converters. This would result in the exact same effect as OLED - black pixel is a pixel turned off. However, while research is ongoing - as far as I am aware small prototype displays have been created - this technology is nowhere near anything producable, much less mass-producable. Problems mirror the same issues OLED had for years if not decades plus some quantum dot specific issues.