THE FLAT PANEL PIPELINE

Jeremy Laird investigates flat panel technology and lifts the lid on what you can expect in the near and not-so-near future

- Jeremy Laird

BE CAREFUL WHAT you ask for—you might just get it. So it goes with screen technology of late. We’ve been clamoring for something better than an LCD panel with a big, dumb backlight for years. Now we’ve got it, and it turns out—in some ways, at least—that conventional LCD monitors aren’t so bad after all.

The new entrants on the display scene are, of course, miniLED and OLED. Mini-LED screens are actually a subset of LCD displays, not a new category of panel tech. But they do represent a significant step change. OLED, meanwhile, has taken its time transitioning from the TV market to PC monitors. But it is a radical new technology and has finally arrived in desktop monitors.

On paper, both offer dramatic advantages over conventional LCD displays. At last, you can have true HDR performance, perpixel lighting, rapid response times and several other hitherto unobtainable screen attributes. In practice, however, they are turning out to be rather more problematic than predicted.

Put it this way: we’ve seen numerous examples of the latest mini-LED and OLED monitors, and we’re not sure we’d take any of them over the best available conventional LCD panels.

There are a couple of caveats to that, which we’ll come to. But along the way, we need to identify what exactly the problems with mini-LED and OLED monitors are, ask if they can be fixed and consider if there are any alternative technologies that entirely sidestep all the issues. Let’s get to it.