LG Display Claims Samsung's QD OLED More Susceptible to Screen Burn Than LG's WOLED

[TheLostSwede]

Welcome to the battle of the Korean OLED display makers, where LG Display is now claiming that Samsung's new-ish QD OLED displays are far more susceptible to screen burn, compared to its own WOLED displays. In a way, this is LG getting back at Samsung, as the latter has criticised LG for quite some time, over screen burn on its OLED displays, despite the fact that Samsung hasn't had any of its own OLED products until last year. LG Display is basing much of its claims on testing by Rtings, which isn't yet publicly available, but the company also has a technical explanation behind it all.

Both LG's and Samsung's OLED panels are based around RGB subpixels, just like most LCD panels, with the difference being that OLED panels don't have a backlight, as the pixels themselves are supposed to emit the light. However, RGB subpixels on larger screens tend to lack in brightness and this is why LG added white subpixels to its WOLED panels, which was also a source of criticism from Samsung. However, Samsung's QD OLED displays use a blue OLED layer behind a Quantum Dot layer, which is meant to produce a brighter image than LG's WOLED panels. LG now claims that because Samsung went down the path of using pure RGB subpixels, each subpixel is subjected to a lot more stress on static images than its own WOLED design, which in turn causes screen burn. LG Display did apparently not go into much more details than that at the online press conference the company had called last week, so we'll have to wait and see what Rtings reveals in its next update on its long term testing, which is supposed to take place sometime this month.

Update Mar 3rd 15:08 UTC: Rtings reached out to us and explained that they didn't provide any data to LG Display. Instead, LG Display based its assumptions on photos posted by Rtings on its website. Rtings provided the following statement:

We didn't send any information to LG Display. We published our two-month data and pictures in two waves on February 6th and 16th. It appears LG took these images from our reviews when they were released publicly.

Further to that point, LG Display also did not reach out to us prior to their press call where they referenced our test and images.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Denver]

Both make products fragile and disposable due to irreparability. Sony is the only TV brand I respect for quality.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Both make products fragile and disposable due to irreparability. Sony is the only TV brand I respect for quality.

Sony uses Samsung QD OLED panels now.

 

[Chane]

I thought Samsung's QD-OLED TVs only had Blue OLEDs and used the QD layer to convert that into Red, Green, and increase the color gamut of the existing Blue OLEDs. I never heard of Samsung using a White OLED.

Edit: I just pulled up the image in the article and it's exactly what I thought. ignore me.

 

[Kaotik]

Samsung QD-OLEDs do NOT have RGB OLEDs, they have only blue, which is turned into RGB by the QD layer

Edit: there's no white layer on Samsung either.

 

[Chrispy_]

I hate WOLED, period.

It's only good for inflating the real specs, just like dynamic contrast used to.

Can a 2000-nit WOLED display 2000-nits of Red, Green, or Blue? No. More like 700 nits. BUT, the marketing can claim 2000 nits because that's how bright it can get as it's burning out your retinas with an inaccurate faded white version of whatever colour it's supposed to be displaying.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Samsung QD-OLEDs do NOT have RGB OLEDs, they have only blue, which is turned into RGB by the QD layer

Edit: there's no white layer on Samsung either.

This is what the Forbes articles says. Maybe I misunderstood something here, but yes, I removed the white part, that was my bad.

It all boils down to the fact that since LG Display’s OLED panels use a white subpixel in the creation of their pictures (something that Samsung has criticised them for over the years, on the grounds that they don’t deliver a pure RGB picture), the RGB subpixels in LG’s WOLED panels are subject to much less stress over time than QD OLED’s RGB subpixels are. And since it’s the ‘fatiguing’ of specific areas of RGB pixels by prolonged exposure to static image elements that causes screen burn, it therefore follows that a pure RGB solution is going to be more susceptible to screen burn than a WOLED one.

 

[Denver]

Sony uses Samsung QD OLED panels now.

What causes problems and premature death in both LG and Samsung brands are the integrated circuit board responsible for the video (vcon).

it seems to be built with intent to fail, note that some monitors come with a 3-4 year warranty but all TV brands only offer 1 year. lol

 

[trsttte]

However, Samsung's QD OLED displays use a second white OLED panel behind the RGB OLED panel to provide extra light. LG now claims that because Samsung went down the path of using pure RGB subpixels

What? From the information that's out there, that's not how QD OLED works at all, they use only blue oled material and use Quantum Dots that pretty much don't degrade to filter out the colors

Maybe something got lost in translation or they're talking about an older tech like QLED or something?

 

[TheLostSwede]

What? From the information that's out there, that's not how QD OLED works at all, they use only blue oled material and use Quantum Dots that are pretty much don't degrade to filter out the colors

Maybe something got lost in translation or they're talking about an older tech like QLED or something?

Yeah, my bad, I've changed it. That said, it's still not entirely clear from the Forbes article.

It all boils down to the fact that since LG Display’s OLED panels use a white subpixel in the creation of their pictures (something that Samsung has criticised them for over the years, on the grounds that they don’t deliver a pure RGB picture), the RGB subpixels in LG’s WOLED panels are subject to much less stress over time than QD OLED’s RGB subpixels are. And since it’s the ‘fatiguing’ of specific areas of RGB pixels by prolonged exposure to static image elements that causes screen burn, it therefore follows that a pure RGB solution is going to be more susceptible to screen burn than a WOLED one.

 

[dir_d]

Sony uses Samsung QD OLED panels now.

This year Sony is using both panels. Top end OLED is QD-OLED and the next tier is WOLED

 

[mrnagant]

Doesn't blue degrade the fastest? Maybe over time the Samsung will degrade faster than the LG? Would be interesting to compare the two technologies after 10years of typical use. I don't think Rtings run accelerated tests that don't cause burn-in to see what IQ/brightness looks like after 15,000hrs of use and track the brightness on a chart.

 

[zlobby]

Well, d'oh!

 

[Iain Saturn]

Doesn't blue degrade the fastest? Maybe over time the Samsung will degrade faster than the LG? Would be interesting to compare the two technologies after 10years of typical use. I don't think Rtings run accelerated tests that don't cause burn-in to see what IQ/brightness looks like after 15,000hrs of use and track the brightness on a chart.

Blue is the most efficient color wavelength - thus easiest to control.

Without the annoying LG color filter array blocking light - QD panels can theoretically run with greater efficiency and last longer (however processing and a TVs ABL have a big impact also). It's why QD monitors from Dell have free 3 year warranties.

Sony's new QD - a95L also has a carbon heat distribution layer to extend the TVs life.

QD-OLED panels from Samsung are WAY ahead of LG. See one in person and it's clear as day.

Cheers

 

[sephiroth117]

I have both a PC QD-OLED display and an LG TV. Been saving for some time for a PC screen upgrade (much needed) and, once you use OLED, it's hard to look at LCD again lol.

I really like both, I can say that my LG TV after years of usage is as new, 0 burn-in despite being used with static HUD in games etc.
My PC display is new but come with a 3 years warranty from Samsung, I'm not too worried (Samsung support in France told me it includes burn in but can't be 100% sure)

Apple is going to introduce in its 2024 ipad pro lineup a new generation of OLED screen (done in conjunctions with display manufacturers) that is reporterdly brighter and more durable

Our salute will come from micro-led: no burn-in, excellent brightness and infinite contrast.

 

[Crackong]

Sounds like some BS talk from the PR team.
WOLED needs the W because it is less efficient so they need to add the W to boost the brightness.
QD-OLED doesn't need the W at all and more efficient = less heat = less burn-in....

 

[Fluffmeister]

Good to see Samsung give LG a bloody nose... and they have only just entered the OLED party.

 

[illli]

hmmm

https://www.reddit.com/r/OLED_Gaming/comments/1159jsp

 

[konga]

Yeah, my bad, I've changed it. That said, it's still not entirely clear from the Forbes article.

Basically, in QD-OLED, there's a layer of blue OLED material that gets translated to red and green light by quantum dots. So the R subpixel has blue oled with a red quantum dot, G has blue oled with a green quantum dot, and B is just the blue oled. There are other polarizing layers and such too, but they're not as important. In order to make white light, R, G, and B illuminate at equal brightness levels. In order to make a bright red light, R simply illuminates very brightly. Because Samsung is using quantum dots, they can convert light at very high efficiency, letting each subpixel get very bright on its own without any help.

With W-OLED, there's red, green, and blue OLED materials layered on top of each other that always shine in equal brightness to produce white light. This white light is filtered using red, green, and blue light filters for the RGB subpixels. There's also a fourth subpixel that shows the unfiltered white light. Again, there are other polarizing layers that aren't important. When the panel wants to display white, it just illuminates the white subpixel, letting the R, G, and B subpixels take a rest. This allows it to get very good brightness ratings when just looking at white screens (how most brightness tests are done). When it wants to make a really bright red image, it makes the red subpixel shine brightly but it also uses the white subpixel to sort of augment the brightness. This causes a mild "wash-out" effect when trying to display heavily saturated colors at high brightness, but in most real content it's not particularly noticeable. (though QD-OLED panels definitely appear more vivid)

Hopefully that helps you understand the differences here. LG's argument is that, because they use the white subpixel for white light and to augment the brightness of different colors, it eases the workload on the RGB subpixels. In order to make bright red, QD-OLED does 100% R, while W-OLED does, say, 67% R/33% W (these are not real figures and just for example). This in theory helps reduce the degradation of the RGB subpixels, but W-OLED may also grow dimmer overall at a faster rate than QD-OLED. They're basing this off of RTINGS' accelerated burn-in test where they're running a ton of TVs on an extreme content regime for like 20 hours a day. Their testing is still young though, so I think LG is jumping the gun a little and we should wait for more test results.

 

[Kaotik]

This is what the Forbes articles says. Maybe I misunderstood something here, but yes, I removed the white part, that was my bad.

It's a bit confusing. Samsung QD-OLED has only blue OLEDs, but the QD layer on top of them turns it into RGB in subpixel size.
So effectively looking from outside it does have RGB subpixels, but the actual OLED part doesn't, it's just blue all around.

 

[R-T-B]

QD-OLED panels from Samsung are WAY ahead of LG. See one in person and it's clear as day.

I have and I can say it's pretty much a case of preference and diminishing returns.

but in most real content it's not particularly noticeable.

This has been my experience. At such high brightness levels you can't really tell anything other than "ahh its bright" anyways.

 

[Chrispy_]

Doesn't blue degrade the fastest? Maybe over time the Samsung will degrade faster than the LG? Would be interesting to compare the two technologies after 10years of typical use. I don't think Rtings run accelerated tests that don't cause burn-in to see what IQ/brightness looks like after 15,000hrs of use and track the brightness on a chart.

Because blue is the highest-energy colour (gross oversimplification, but this isn't the place for multiple pages of physics and biology detailing the wave/particle duality of photons, or how the three different amino acids in your retina's cone cells react differently to photons of various energy levels)

The TL;DR is that quantum dots just split an incoming photon in two -They cannot add energy from nowhere. If you feed a quantum dot red light (a low-energy photon), there's no way to get blue light out (a high-energy photon). The other way around works just fine - you feed a quantum dot blue light (a high-energy photon) and it splits it into two lower energy photos - one that is "normal red", and the other would be far infra-red, invisible to us.

So yes, blue OLEDs burn out faster than red, green, or white OLEDs, but at least they don't colour-shift with age because all of the OLEDs are the same colour and age at the same rate.

 

[ymdhis]

I'll just wait a year or so after they are out, to see the consensus on which one is better. I'm still on a high-end panasonic plasma (fitted with a PMCv2 to restore black levels), and it's only now with OLED that TVs start to beat the picture quality of that, not counting HDR and 4k which I have no use of. That one had image retention too, it wasn't really a problem, it only got serious if I displayed the exact same content for a week nonstop, and even then it went away after a week is displaying something else.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Both make products fragile and disposable due to irreparability. Sony is the only TV brand I respect for quality.

Sony? The ridiculous overpriced company that their products broke within 6 months after the warranty expires?
The Sony that sells LG panels TVs for x3 times the price?

 

[mechtech]

Need smaller sizes (for monitors) and better prices.

https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/lg-48-4k-uhd-hdr-oled-webos-thinq-ai-smart-tv-oled48a2pua-2022/16666203

If I can get a 48" 4k oled tv for $1000CAD then a 24" should be about $250 or at least a 24" 1080p

Good luck....................