I see everyone talk about OLED like it’s the best thing ever and it’s been a thing for years yet it’s not a standard in the industry. Like for example an original PS Vita had a OLED screen then they removed it for the 2nd version of the PS Vita.
Even the Nintendo Switch which came out years after the PS Vita didn’t have an OLED and just a few years ago now it does.
Why isn’t it the standard if it’s so good?
In: Engineering
OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diodes.
It’s different from standard LED panels in that standard LED panels have an array of white lights and then a film over it where the film can only let certain lights through to create color. So if it blocks red and blue, only green light comes through. But it can’t block light completely, so if you have say a single pixel white star on what is supposed to be black space background, the area around the star will be a little gray because the LED for that section is turned on. They can change the color but they can’t completely change the amount of light in a given area.
OLED has very flat LEDs that control the color as well as the light for each individual pixel. So that white star can have a perfect black next to it. It’s also better in the sense it’s more energy efficient especially when most of the screen is black because you don’t have to light up a whole section, only the specific areas you want lit up.
As to why OLED isn’t the standard, it comes down to two reasons. Cost and reliability.
Cost is pretty straightforward. OLED screens are more expensive than standard LED backlit screens.
In terms of reliability. There are actually two different types of OLED one that only works for small screens like your phone or a Nintendo switch and one that works for bigger screens like TVs. The type that works for bigger screens suffers from something called burn in, which is basically when an image stays on a screen too long it leaves a little bit of that image burned onto the screen for a while, if it’s there too long this can even become permanent. For this reason standard led backlit screens are often better for things where images can be left on the screen a long time and can also be better for gaming because there is less ghosting.
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