Comment by pedromoss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pedromoss | Hacker News Reader

I have never had a great experience with OLED on larger screens, whether monitors or laptops. In smartphones, OLED burn-in is much less of a practical concern because of pixel-shifting and other mitigation done by the OS. The use of phone is mostly switching between apps, watching videos, texting, and making calls, rather than displaying the same text for hours so that makes sense. I still prefer IPS LCD for monitors and laptops because text looks crisper, which matters if you spend hours reading or working. OLED makes more sense to me for watching movies and other video content. In my opinion, Apple did it correctly, MacBook uses a Mini-LED backlit LCD, so you get a quality display with HDR while also having sharp text, and you don't have to worry about burn-in issues. There is MicroLED[1], which promises to combine OLED-like blacks and response with better longevity by avoiding screen burn-in issues. At the moment, it seems no major manufacturers are providing it because of cost and other factors.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroLED

The issue with text on OLED panels is typically due to the sub pixel layout, they tend to use different sub pixel layouts to traditional monitors which causes issues with subpixel rendering and can make text look blurry or have color fringing.

However, recently you can now get OLED panels from LG with RGB stripe sub pixel layouts (matching traditional monitors) which eliminates this problem and text should be just as good as an non-OLED display.

Yeah, I'm using one (the Alienware 3926), and it's fine. You'd never know it wasn't IPS except that it's better off-axis and has vastly better blacks and no light bleed.

That sounds like something someone would write a driver for that then installs a rootkit

At 4K / 32", grayscale antialiasing looks pretty good to me, so IMO the strip layout isn't strictly required. It's merely an improvement on top of pretty good.

Also, macOS has abandoned subpixel rendering and GTK 4 followed (https://blogs.gnome.org/gtk/2024/03/07/on-fractional-scales-... ). Its days may be numbered.

I am not at all in favor of removing the possibility to have subpixel rendering, by the way. "Low" DPI screens are extremely common and probably will be for many years. I absolutely want subpixel rendering on these.

Apple removed it because they have only high-DPI screens left in their hardware and, frankly, they have a tradition of blurry font rendering anyway. GTK did it because they like to remove features and pretend that they're Apple. Apple is being a slight jerk about it because non-Apple external screens exist - the GTK guys are being big jerks because it's a middle finger to many existing users. It doesn't even save that much work for them! FreeType and probably some Harfbuzz are doing the heavy lifting.

I have many criticisms of Apple and their hardware, but the Mini-LED screen on the M1 MBP I had at a previous job was stunning. I was in the market was a Mini-LED monitor last year and ended up settling with an IPS LCD in the end due to the lack of premium high-refresh 1440p options at the time.

Yes, the rumours of an upcoming MacBook Pro switching to OLED fill me with dread.

You will like Tandem OLED which is the screen that is used on the large screen, iPad Pro’s made by LG.

Tandem OLED solves the problem of burn-in, but it cost more than standard OLED on large screens which is why Samsung didn’t want to supply Apple so Apple went to LG.

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