DARK MATTER

OLED is the TV standard now-so why not in monitors?

- Phil Iwaniuk

What's next? While we await the drip-down of one TV tech to monitors, the TV world's already looking for the next big thing to follow it. MicroLED is another self-emissive technology like OLED which promises four to five times the brightness and better colors. It's years away from mass production, though.

Organic light-emitting diodes have been all the rage in your front room for years now. While traditional LED or LCD TV panels struggled to achieve natural blacks and realistic colors, OLED tellies can O render true black on one pixel, and vibrant color on an adjacent one. It's light years ahead of the older tech, a massive visual step forward akin to the advent of HD.

It's also a perfect screen technology for PC gaming in many ways. Most OLED TV panels refresh at 120Hz, and if you've played consecutive rounds of an online shooter at 60Hz and then 120Hz, you know the difference that that can make. The color reproduction is ideal for games, and the incredibly thin panel size would be a real space saver on your desk. These are all fine properties for an OLED PC monitor. You may have noticed, however, that you don't currently have one. And that, in fact, basically nobody does yet.

The mystery of OLED's slow adoption to PC is one thing we can't simply put down to the pandemic or the semiconductor shortage-the problems run deeper than that. Although it seems like a no-brainer to us as enthusiast-grade consumers to drape our desks with the latest panel tech finery, there's actually a tangled knot of issues holding OLED back from invading the Newegg and Scan monitor listings and helping us up our K/D/A ratios.