OLED viewing angles?

[speancer]

Hello,

I've been using LG C2 42-inch OLED TV as a desktop monitor for a few months now, as the main display for my new 4K gaming rig. For the most part I've greatly enjoyed the experience, especially true HDR. However, there's one thing that concerns me. I heard a lot of praise towards OLED displays in terms of viewing angles, which are supposed to be superior to any LCD display - that seems to be not exactly the case for me. When I sit in center position towards the display, everything is fine except bluish tinting on the sides. When I lean left or right though, off-center, I can clearly see discoloration (colour washout) and quite aggressive tinting on the opposite side, especially visible on brighter images. Is this normal? Because that's not exactly what I'd call good viewing angles, and I guess I expected perfect viewing angles from an OLED display, so this is disappointing.

I'd appreciate any feedback on that matter.

[jorimt]

When I sit in center position towards the display, everything is fine except bluish tinting on the sides. When I lean left or right though, off-center, I can clearly see discoloration (colour washout) and quite aggressive tinting on the opposite side, especially visible on brighter images. Is this normal? Because that's not exactly what I'd call good viewing angles, and I guess I expected perfect viewing angles from an OLED display, so this is disappointing.

It's normal for WOLED and severity can vary by model year and screen size. The closer you are to the screen, the more evident this type of edge tinting can be.

It has less to do with actual viewing angles (which is still far superior to LCD), and more to do with uniformity issues introduced by the overall panel construction and the amount of layers (color filters, polarizer, anti-reflective coating) present with WOLED.

There are other technical explanations I've seen elsewhere, but I can't recall them off-the-top-of-my-head (I'd have to dig them up again).

QD-OLED panels have less of these uniformity issues, but they have their own trade-offs as a result (lack of a polarizer layer in most models, for instance, which reduces perceived black depth in well lit environments).

[speancer]

Thank you for answering. So, OLED is also panel lottery, figures. That is so freaking annoying, really. I mean, LG C2 is not cheap, and yet you can get really bad panel. Mine is not that bad, but I've seen really bad ones, like with extreme blue tinting on the sides (which I had to return, couldn't stand it). As for QD-OLED, I completely lost interest in that technology for a simple reason - absence of polarizer. If you literally live in basement then QD-OLED is for you Anyway, I enjoy my OLED experience thoroughly. The true HDR experience is something else. Some games look absolutely incredible with HDR on OLED.

[Chief Blur Buster]

I've been working on OLEDs as of late (240Hz FTW) including Visual Studio. One of the YouTubers let that cat out of the bag a smidge early, so there you go.

In my experience, if you work a lot with text - WOLED is somewhat more ClearType compatible than QD-OLED, but you have to pick your poison there. You want to instead download "Better ClearType Tuner" and configure that way instead of via the normal Windows 11 ClearType tuner.

[jorimt]

So, OLED is also panel lottery, figures. That is so freaking annoying, really. I mean, LG C2 is not cheap, and yet you can get really bad panel. Mine is not that bad, but I've seen really bad ones, like with extreme blue tinting on the sides (which I had to return, couldn't stand it). As for QD-OLED, I completely lost interest in that technology for a simple reason - absence of polarizer. If you literally live in basement then QD-OLED is for you Anyway, I enjoy my OLED experience thoroughly. The true HDR experience is something else. Some games look absolutely incredible with HDR on OLED.

No display is trade-off-free, and while there might be a time in the future where the trade-offs decrease, I doubt there will ever be none.

In my experience, if you work a lot with text - WOLED is somewhat more ClearType compatible than QD-OLED, but you have to pick your poison there. You want to instead download "Better ClearType Tuner" and configure that way instead of via the normal Windows 11 ClearType tuner.

Yup, it's due in part to QD-OLED's triangular subpixel configuration. Good to see the majority of the deal-breaking artifacts incurred by said structure are primarily down to issues that can be mostly corrected by software solutions though.

[Chief Blur Buster]

This is where an open source Windows indirect display driver would be useful here -- the same harness I'd love to use for software BFI and simulated VRR -- the driver can be subpixel-structure-aware (by giving it, perhaps a macro-photo bitmask that it automatically analyzes and adapts).

Windows would render at 2x+ the visible resolution and the driver would subpixel-structure-aware downsample the resolution, whether it was the triangle pixel structure or a Pentile pixel structure. This would dramatically improve text clarity, without waiting for Microsoft to support non-standard pixel structures in text rendering.

You'd use DPI scaling support (200%+) to get the same UI size you had at lower resolutions; recent apps and versions of Windows is much better at DPI scaling and this will allow the subpixel-aware supersampling trick.

Then the pixel structure would matter a lot less, as long as there was an ability to 1:1 map the colors to the subpixels, in a controlled way, if the display's own scaler does not do this automatically.