OLED Issues With Text

High Hz on OLED produce excellent strobeless motion blur reduction with fast GtG pixel response. It is easier to tell apart 60Hz vs 120Hz vs 240Hz on OLED than LCD, and more visible to mainstream. Includes WOLED and QD-OLED displays.
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Enigma
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OLED Issues With Text

Post by Enigma » 14 Dec 2025, 03:17

Hi :)

I'm in the market for a new monitor(s) for my office. Replacing a dual-IPS@75hz each setup, and came across a message where Chief said he's currently using a 45" Ultrawide OLED with MacType optimizations to fix the text fringing, I assume. I'd like to ask, please -

Does anybody know what model and resolution that monitor is? Is it a regular 3440x1440, or 5120x1440? I avoided these resolutions on these monitor sizes because I thought the PPI was too low to avoid seeing text fringing, but is that MacType hack fixing it completely? If so, is there a way to make it work on Fedora as well as on Windows?

I kept looking for 4k@27 OLEDs for their high PPI, but if there's a way to fix the text issues without going that route, I'm all in.

Also, what are you current thoughts on OLED vs IPS (or VA?) for office work. I know IPS has long been considered the king of office work and text clarity, but I read some of the articles here on OLEDS and 480hz,, etc, I saw some advocating for OLEDS for office work. Is it because of the lack of strobing/flicker compared to IPS/VA? Is its because of the blacks so if you're on Dark Mode you get less light shot onto your eyes?

Your response much appreciated.
Thank you.

Dalek
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Re: OLED Issues With Text

Post by Dalek » 15 Dec 2025, 05:45

In short: Don't bother upgrading to OLED yet until the text clarity/sub-pixel layout issue is fully fixed. The hype and excitement of OLED ended for me when I looked at how bad the text clarity was.

Stick with TN/IPS for now.

I tried a 27" 4K QD-OLED 240hz monitor in the hopes that it would make text clarity decent, but it sadly doesn't. The best way to describe it is having a mix of extremely soft blur and/or chromatic abberation around text. If you also use windows night light, this will also make text clarity look even less sharp.

I also tried mac type and while it did help slightly with windows explorer looking better, mac type does not change text clarity across all applications, so it's a bit pointless to use. Even then, the text clarity was an insignificant improvement.

WOLED might be slightly better in terms of text clarity (I haven't tried WOLED yet) but even then, I really don't think you're getting your money's worth.

I ended up going back to my LCD monitor because the colour fringing was unbearable.

Reviewers will also use the typical line of: "You'll notice it on the desktop but not in games" line too, this is misleading because even in games any form of text looks noticeably bad. While things do look normal for the most part in games, if you look at the edge or outline of objects, you will also notice colour fringing there too. It's just something that I couldn't ignore and as much as I really wanted to stick with OLED, it just wasn't worth the hassle and eyestrain of colour fringing.

I also tried a 500hz 1440p QD-OLED monitor and the text clarity was even worse.
Last edited by Dalek on 16 Dec 2025, 08:39, edited 1 time in total.

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Discorz
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Re: OLED Issues With Text

Post by Discorz » 16 Dec 2025, 05:55

I think I remember seeing a picture of one of those older-gen 45" 1440p 240Hz WOLEDs on Chief's desk, not sure tho.

Small text on ~108 ppi OLEDs (27" 1440p) at 100% scale is not great. I tried such WOLED recently and at times it felt like my vision degraded due to fringing/blur. That was without subpixel handling corrections. Haven't tried QD-OLED but I assume they're worse. If u're planning going OLED definitely consider higher OS scale + higher resolution to mitigate the fringing. This way they should be more tolerable since errors are smaller proportion to the size of the objects (eg. text).

There are too many flaws that these OLED have that need to be resolved to justify the price. Until then I'll stay on LCD for few more years. In the meantime prices will go down too.

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