OLED, explained: Incredible tech, but what about cost and content?

Recently, I took a deep dive into the world of high dynamic range (HDR), because it's a curious new trend in TV technology—as in, equal parts mesmerizing and confusing. There's a learning curve to understand what HDR offers, especially since the difference doesn't always pop in fluorescent-lit showrooms. At the same time, HDR-10 sets are starting to become affordable, and what's sometimes hard to appreciate at a big-box retailer can look quite stunning in your own home.

In many ways, the same can be said about the other major TV standard that we're seeing more lately: OLED, which stands for organic light emitting diode. It's being called the future of TV tech, promising deeper blacks, less motion blur, and sexier colors.

Conveniently, OLED screens are also coming down in price. "Affordable" isn't the right word, but we're getting there, with the $9,000 55-inch sets of 2013 being succeeded by models as cheap as $2,300 (along with larger screen options for more cash). Some have 3D, others have curved panels, and all of this year's models have support for HDR modes and 4K resolutions.

So today, we're continuing to break down the modern screen landscape by breaking down OLED: how does it work and do the technology's advertised claims hold up? Along with some answers, we also have details about how manufacturers and content producers fit into the current OLED picture.

The blacker the pixel...

You may see the acronym OLED and think you're not getting anything much different from LED panels already on the market. What is "organic" LED? Is this like shopping for eggs? Should we make a "free range LED" joke?

The short answer: the word "organic" gets to the heart of the OLED difference. It explains how its image-generation differs from the competition.

Consider LED screens, which are themselves something of a misnomer. When you hear about an LED screen, it's actually an LCD (liquid crystal display) screen but with improved back-lighting technology called LED. In modern LCD screens, liquid crystals are activated by electricity to rotate and allow light to come through each tiny square of the image (or pixel). Light shines through red, blue, and green filters, and these mixes combine for every color in the spectrum from dark to white. If all panels are rotated in such a way, they let no light through for any of the three colors, resulting in "black."

While this crystal-rotation trick has tons of benefits (cheap price, thin, light materials), LCD screens have their drawbacks, the obvious one being black level. Even if an LCD screen's crystals are rotated in such a way as to block all color information (and create a "black" pixel), they're still backlit by a panel. This will always result in a "light bleed" effect that projectors and antiquated CRT screens don't have to contend with.

An LED version of an LCD screen mostly works the same way, but it uses a superior type of bright back panel. We could get into the weeds about back panels (LED vs. CCFL), but the major difference is that LED panels can drive images that are simultaneously brighter and darker to deliver a greater contrast ratio. Newer LED TVs have what's known as a "full array" of smaller LED panels, which can be individually dimmed by the TV itself. If a portion of the current scene in a film, show, or game is dark, that portion's backlight can be dimmed to reduce the amount of light bleed coming through. This will dramatically improve the visible contrast ratio (meaning, how well black sits next to white in an image), but it's still not a pure black value. Light remains, however dim, behind the liquid crystals.

This fact, among others, has made TV snobs hold tightly to their older plasma TVs. Plasma pixels can run darker, because they are not backlit. However, each of the three individual cells that makes up a pixel on a plasma screen has to be charged slightly in order to make the screen quickly responsive to incoming changes, even when the TV is not trying to represent light or color in that pixel. This means a tiny bit of energy is being transmitted through a plasma set's blackest-valued pixels, but that value is still usually less than all but the finest LED screens. Plasma sets are no longer being produced by major manufacturers, by the way, since they don't support resolutions higher than 1080p and have remained costly, heavy, and power-hungry to produce.

Comparatively, OLED's clearest improvement comes from its utter lack of backlight. Instead, individual OLED pixels are made from an organic material that emits light from within whenever it's fed electric current. If a pixel receives no current, it emits no light in the red, blue, or green color spaces. This creates the purest black, Nigel Tufnel black.

Once you can deliver pixels with absolute-zero values for color and brightness, you enter a new realm of contrast-ratio territory. Even the littlest hint of light in the blackest part of an image changes the perceptible contrast ratio.

How much? Well, if a screen merits the Ultra HD Premium certification sticker, its pixels must achieve a minimum brightness threshold. That number of "nits" varies based on the lowest black value achievable. If your maximum black level is somewhere between 0.0005 and 0.5 nits, your set will need to reach a brightness maximum of at least 1,000 nits. Get the maximum black level darker than that, and the required brightness maximum is only 540 nits.

Check your cave

How 540 nits of maximum brightness looks depends on your ideal TV location, of course, and if your coziest room has bright lights of any kind, that can put a damper on the OLED difference. Affordable OLED displays on the market this year tend to max out in the 700-800 nit range, while traditional LED sets can get a lot brighter, in the 1,400-1,500 nit range.

In my experience with LG's 55-inch B6 OLED screen, a brightness maximum just shy of 800 nits holds up in a nighttime room with a lamp on or in daytime viewing with all shades drawn. Normal daytime viewing and bright lights around the screen simply have a greater impact on the visibility of your content, no matter how many anti-glare coatings it may ship with. You might not get as good of a return on your OLED investment if you want to prop it up in a giant, social, daytime room.

Dim the lights just enough, however, and the OLED contrast ratio—which, thanks to that 100 percent black value, is technically an "infinite" contrast ratio—is instantly apparent. However, that contrast ratio is not a magic switch to make all content look better. Streamed content on SDR platforms such as PlayStation Vue and Hulu sometimes contains "black" data that is not sent to the TV as a pure black. Them's the breaks when you put generic motor oil into a McLaren twin-turbo V8 engine.

De-blur—and de problem with content

Source content presents similar issues when you try to enjoy the second major innovation of the OLED standard: its incredible ability to limit display-based motion blur.

In addition to their ability to emit light from within, OLED pixels also have the sexy quality of changing the color they emit almost instantaneously compared to the multi-millisecond bleed from one color to the next on an LED panel. The simplest explanation is that the process of activating liquid crystals, and having them rotate to permit or block light, takes more time (however brief) than it does for an OLED pixel to be activated and change its internally produced colored light.

On paper, this sounds like a clear victory over the LCD and LED standards, but in testing, I ultimately found that an OLED TV set's faster refresh abilities don't wave a magic wand over visible blur. I cannot speak for the entire spectrum of OLED sets (more on that later), but if I wanted to see an incredible zero-blur image on my test unit—an LG B6—I had to load specific content and turn on specific image-boosting properties.

The most impressive test result came when I went to TestUFO.com, a site that's renowned for its visual tests relating to motion blur. I ran its "moving photo" test with LG's TruMotion “de-blur” setting to its maximum value (10 out of 10), and every single test image looked like a bright, real-life postcard being mechanically moved across the screen. I was astounded. Quite frankly, I've never seen a TV set, even with image-boosting properties turned on, that produced such a blur-less moving image.

That impressive test was because the de-blur setting interpolated the moving image between frames to undercut OLED's main motion-blur failing: the "sample-and-hold" effect. With no boosts to image quality enabled, OLED screens can still look like they're blurring, but for a different reason than with other displays. In OLED's case, holding an image at the precise point of its refresh, as opposed to adding natural judder (like with a projected film) or blur (like with a constantly refreshed LCD pixel), leaves the eye focusing on content in an unnatural way. In real life, tiny pixels don't hang in mid-air awaiting their next sub-millisecond refresh.

Depending on the real-world content you watch, the de-blur setting can just as easily show no visible effect, especially if the content you're watching already has visible blurring in the source material (such as a high-action scene in a 24-frames-per-second film). Conversely, my testing unit would sporadically insert a "soap opera" effect of overly smooth motion with de-blur cranked to the max. This proved too unpredictable for my liking. Ultimately, I found a very slight motion blur boost (set to 2 out of 10) and split the difference. I never felt like I was watching buttery-smooth, hyper-realistic content, nor did I feel like I was watching an antiquated LED screen.

I wanted very badly to put this OLED panel's best motion-blur properties to the test, but I struggled to find proper showcase content. UHD Blu-rays, which support 4K resolution and HDR, offer the sharpest, least compressed images, but the only ones I could buy were motion pictures filmed at 24 frames-per-second. Meanwhile, you just can't find much 4K professional sports to watch on any cable, satellite, or streaming provider, and the standard 720p and 1080i network-TV football I watched looked like a reproduction of a low-quality signal. I watched sports content from a trusted antenna signal, so as to avoid cable- or satellite-related compression, and the lack of display-based blur on top of that lowly signal was appreciated. It just made me hunger for the rest of the content ecosystem to catch up.

Sports, we need more 4K in sports.

Forums won't save you in one aspect...

Another major OLED advantage is closely related to its black-level properties: it's able to power richer, more realistic color in videos, especially with that infinite contrast ratio in play. However, be warned on this aspect. The budget you set aside for an OLED TV will almost certainly be at least $100 more than you think.

That's because you're going to want some type of professional calibration.

Here's the funny thing about OLED technology: Currently, the screens do not ship with standard, precisely tuned color values in the red, blue, and green spectrums. You and I could own the exact same model OLED display, shipped from the same factory, and yet we could find ourselves with different default color values. Why? It's impossible to manufacture these panels with such precision that they are all identical off the assembly line, and the cost of doing an individual calibration on every single set would be prohibitive. You won't get something hugely imbalanced, mind you, but you can't expect to load universal values from a support or fansite forum and get optimal image and color reproduction based on established color-gamut standards.

Making matters trickier is the fact that calibration requires good test images, which can be analyzed by a device such as a colorimeter to help with fine-tuned settings. The problem is you'll need a test image that runs from a device with HDR-10 output support; while you can find test patterns on standard Blu-rays and within certain consumer devices (such as the Xbox One's calibration-pattern suite), these are tuned for SDR. All HDR TV sets, OLED or otherwise, have totally different settings once HDR-10 and Dolby Vision inputs are detected.

Combine these two issues, and you have a bit of a perfect-color pain to look forward to. You're clearly not spending this much on a TV and then letting an uneven color balance go by unchecked, right?

Spelling "OLED" with the letters L and G

The last point to note is that right now, LG is the sole manufacturer of consumer-grade OLED TV sets in the world. Panasonic sells OLED panels outside of the United States, but even these include LG technologies, while LG is the sole OLED TV seller stateside.

This isn't a matter of patents or other logistical challenges (with some exceptions). Other TV manufacturers have elected not to dive into OLED TVs, owing to their high cost. These companies continue to stick with LED technologies and improved backlight dimming systems. The market seems to be declaring that screen makers can more easily make a profit selling LED TVs than OLED ones for now. (Manufacturers of smaller smartphone screens are still willing to throw the cash at OLED and AMOLED technologies, mind you.)

So, your options this 2016 season boil down to LG's B6, C6, and E6 TV lines, which each come in 55" and 65" varieties. We have recently seen the B6 as cheap as $1,799 for the 55-inch version (though it's up to $2,299 at most retailers as of press time), and you'll generally find this as the lowest-priced 2016 LG OLED option. Usually, the C6 costs the same in both sizes, though it sports a different internal processing unit, a curved screen, and a 3D effect. The highest-priced E6 has similar display, lag, and 3D performance to the C6, with a flattened screen.

OLED technology, by the way, stands out because its pixels can be arranged as a sheet however a manufacturer wants. Want to build a curved screen? So long as you can manufacture curved glass and other curve-friendly elements, that'll work pretty much however you design the set. Want the screen to be wholly or partially transparent? That works, too.

Whether you pick the B6 or C6 may depend on your room's setup. If you can't get rid of certain bright lights in your room, the curve may offer a natural buffer so that your light sources don't directly shine on the screen, and your couch may be set up in such a way that you get all the viewing-angle perks of a curved screen. I much prefer a flat screen, myself, and I like that it shows off OLED's incredible viewing angles, which far exceed any I've seen in an LED panel.

Breathe, don't get frustrated. We have some recommendations after gathering all this TV info.

Credit: Nick Thompson

OLED it or O-leave it?

Ultimately, would I tell anybody to rush out and immediately buy an OLED TV this holiday season?

For many shoppers, no way. If you're not aiming for the HDR-10 or Dolby Vision standards right now, then you can spend as little as $500 or $600 for a large, high-quality LED screen with full 4K resolution, low motion blur, and low input lag. However, you'll miss out on OLED's gold-standard infinite contrast ratio, while you might also be out of the price range of local-dimming LED panels. This path, ultimately, means you'll save hundreds of dollars that you can invest in other living-room perks. (Like, you know, a killer surround-sound system, which may very well do more for your sense of home-theater immersion.)

If you're teetering toward the world of HDR content, on the other hand, that's where OLED starts to get interesting. At sale values as low as $1,800, the 55" LG B6 can occasionally hang on the same store shelves as the highest rated HDR-10 55" Samsung and Sony sets, which teeter in the $1,500-$1,900 range.

If you're already in that spending-threshold territory, your questions change. First, how bright is your ideal room? If you want to watch a TV in a basement, a dungeon, or an easily dimmed living room, OLED's contrast-ratio payoff is clear. If not, Samsung and Sony have more sheer brightness to offer. (Vizio's comparable offerings, by the way, currently do not quite pack the same brightness punch.)

Second, how big do you want to go? If you want a screen larger than 65"—and you may very well want that to better see the 4K resolution difference—then OLED's a no-go for your massive screening room of choice. (Unless you want to spend over $20,000 on LG's 77-inch OLED set, anyway.)

Third, are you gonna game on this thing? If so, you have to accept the fact that your input lag on the OLEDs could be as high as 30-45 milliseconds, compared to the 22 milliseconds or less from other sets in the HDR-10 category. As of press time, LG's latest firmware patch for the B6 just began rolling out, just after its patches for the C6 and E6 were released to address input lag issues (with some success).

However, less motion blur on OLED panels manifests well when playing games. Meaning, you may prefer your gaming experience with more input lag and less motion blur (or, you'll at least find that it feels equally responsive). For now, the input lag is just enough that you will not want one of these screens as your primary first-person shooter TV if you play competitively. I've been able to enjoy shooters like Titanfall 2 and Overwatch on a B6, but it's not the same as a 5ms-or-less G2G monitor.

Lastly, are you patient? Until more crisp 4K content—as in, minimally compressed with high frame rates—comes down the pipeline, you're not going to reap the major benefits of reduced motion blur. A PlayStation 4 Pro is a good start, as some of its optimized games deliver content with 4K and near-4K resolutions and 60 frames-per-second refreshes. Next year's Xbox One update, currently code-named Project Scorpio, will be even more powerful and may power more true 4K/60fps content—but, again, input lag will remain a factor in either of those cases.