MiniLED

For years, I’ve watched the monitor market with a mix of excitement and skepticism. OLED technology has been dangled in front of us as the holy grail of display tech: perfect, infinite contrast, pixel-level light control, and instantaneous response times. Having benchmarked and used OLED TVs and monitors, I can confirm the image quality is, in a word, sublime. It makes traditional LCDs look washed out and grey by comparison. The allure of those perfect blacks is undeniable. But my engineering brain always kicks in and points to the compromises, the fundamental trade-offs that marketing departments conveniently ignore. There’s the “OLED tax”—a significant price premium—and the ever-present, nagging fear of permanent burn-in. For a multi-purpose PC that displays static taskbars, browser tabs, and application UIs for hours on end, that risk is not trivial. It represents a baked-in depreciation model that I find hard to swallow. So, the critical question for any discerning buyer in 2025 is this: how close can we get to that OLED experience without inheriting its flaws and costs? This is my data-driven quest to find the definitive answer. ...