[SOLVED] Is it that difficult to get a monitor without backlight bleed, IPS glow and blocky artifacts?

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modeonoff

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Hello, over the past few years, I have used various Lenovo laptops and 4K LCD screens from established monitor companies like LG and BenQ. However, they always have some sort of backlight bleed, IPS glow and/or blocky artifacts when playing movies with dark background. Apple's products, on the other hand, have no such issues. Is getting a display without such issues for the PC a lottery? The so-called "fix" by lowering the brightness or avoiding the use of monitor in a dark environment to hide the issues is kind of defeating manufacturer's claims that their monitors can produce high brightness level and good for movie watching. I read that OLED displays have not such issue but I hesitate to buy them due to potential burn in.
 
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You might try Samsung's QLED technology, and they do make a 32" TV with it. I have one, and it is pretty decent compared to my 4K LCD.

Lutfij

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The monitor I own right now and work off of is a Samsung P2350. It had practically no backlight bleed but over the years, I can tell it has it now...after about (a little more than)a decades worth of use. The panels these days have some manner or form of backlight bleed out of the box. OLED panels have that affect reduced, but not entirely eliminated.
 
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The monitor I own right now and work off of is a Samsung P2350. It had practically no backlight bleed but over the years, I can tell it has it now...after about (a little more than)a decades worth of use. The panels these days have some manner or form of backlight bleed out of the box. OLED panels have that affect reduced, but not entirely eliminated.
OLED does not and cannot have backlight bleed.
 
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Hello, over the past few years, I have used various Lenovo laptops and 4K LCD screens from established monitor companies like LG and BenQ. However, they always have some sort of backlight bleed, IPS glow and/or blocky artifacts when playing movies with dark background. Apple's products, on the other hand, have no such issues. Is getting a display without such issues for the PC a lottery? The so-called "fix" by lowering the brightness or avoiding the use of monitor in a dark environment to hide the issues is kind of defeating manufacturer's claims that their monitors can produce high brightness level and good for movie watching. I read that OLED displays have not such issue but I hesitate to buy them due to potential burn in.
I have an LG VA monitor that has almost imperceptible backlight bleed. IPS by nature has a glow or bleed. Reviews state the newer nano-IPS has much less glow/bleed than older technology.
 
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modeonoff

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Monitors that I have tried cost below $700. The most expensive one is the LG32UN880-B. Do $900+ monitors have less such issues? I may get banned if I keep buying and returning.

After trying several IPS panels, I tried a BenQ EW3270U VA monitor. It has some kind of backlight of about 1.75cm wide along one edge. Kind of annoying to see it.

Are panels using local dimming better than those using IPS backlight or nano-IPS?
 
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Hello, over the past few years, I have used various Lenovo laptops and 4K LCD screens from established monitor companies like LG and BenQ. However, they always have some sort of backlight bleed, IPS glow and/or blocky artifacts when playing movies with dark background. Apple's products, on the other hand, have no such issues. Is getting a display without such issues for the PC a lottery? The so-called "fix" by lowering the brightness or avoiding the use of monitor in a dark environment to hide the issues is kind of defeating manufacturer's claims that their monitors can produce high brightness level and good for movie watching. I read that OLED displays have not such issue but I hesitate to buy them due to potential burn in.
IPS glow is part of the nature of the technology. Maybe Apple has more stringent requirements so the glow is more even so you don't notice it, but every IPS panel is going to have this problem.

Also the block artifacts in videos during dark scenes is also the nature of the beast. Your eyes are more sensitive to changes with darker colors than brighter ones, and for most video there's only 256 levels of brightness to choose from. There are ways to change this with the so-called gamma correction curve (you might've seen this in games)

In any case, this video explains it better than I can:

Are panels using local dimming better than those using IPS backlight or nano-IPS?
IPS is not a backlight technology.

As for local dimming, how much better it can improve image quality largely depends on how many lighting zones it has, otherwise you get noticeable so-called haloing or blooming around areas of high contrast. I would argue for this to not be as distracting, the TV needs at least 1000 zones for a 4K display.

EDIT: More ramblings on displays

With regards to IPS glow, unless you're viewing dark content in a dark room, it's not that noticeable anyway. And if you get an LED strip to put behind the monitor so it lights up whats behind it, that can increase the apparent ambient brightness such that your eyes don't really perceive it anymore. But if your goal is to have a cinematic experience, then IPS is not the display type to use.

With regards to OLED and burn-in, Rtings.com did a test starting from 2017 that lasted for basically 2 years, where they they were on for 20 hours a day (broken up into 4 separate times with an hour of "resting"). This is basically the equivalent about 5 hours per day of use for 5 years. The only significant amount of burn-in that happened was when showing something that had a bright solid color in the same spot. OLED panel technology has improved over the years to the point where burn-in is less of an issue. And in my own experience with OLED, I owned three devices that I daily drove: a Zune HD (5 or so years of use), a Moto X (2 years), and a Samsung Galaxy S10+ (3 years). Despite all of them having either a static image or something they displayed constantly, none of them appeared to have significant burn-in by the time they were retired.

I mean, we've used CRTs for decades without concern, even when you consider that Windows introduced a static element to the screen since 1995.
 
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I will check the number of lighting zones.

It looks like the only display that can do 4K at 32" is the LG one. It costs about $4K. So expensive! I also cannot find any OLED 4K 32" TV.
You're not going to find OLED monitors at that size for cheap, simply because there hasn't been a demand for them.

That may change in the near future with QD-OLED displays.
 
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modeonoff

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Thank you. In real use, how is text clarity? What so special about QLED? It looks like they don't have 4K32" in their 2022 lineup. Same for Sony and LG.

I have been using a 49" Sony 4K TV as a monitor for a few years. Gaming is excellent but it is too big for work. Now I am typing on a BenQ EW3270U VA monitor. Gaming is not great as the colors are not as vivid as my TV. However, text seems to be more comfortable to read for long time. Do you think it is due to the matte screen or BenQ's Low Blue Light or B.I.+ technologies?
 
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Eximo

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Thank you. In real use, how is text clarity? What so special about QLED? It looks like they don't have 4K32" in their 2022 lineup. Same for Sony and LG.

I have been using a 49" Sony 4K TV as a monitor for a few years. Gaming is excellent but it is too big for work. Now I am typing on a BenQ EW3270U VA monitor. Gaming is not great as the colors are not as vivid as my TV. However, text seems to be more comfortable to read for long time. Do you think it is due to the matte screen or BenQ's Low Blue Light or B.I.+ technologies?

QLED is an interesting technology. You eliminate the white backlight and replace it with a blue one. Then you have quantum dots, which are effectively a chemical that absorbs blue light and retransmits in only Red or Green (mostly). So closer to the phosphors of CRTs. Still an edge lit LCD in this case, and this cheaper one doesn't do local dimming (which honestly, I prefer)

Neo QLED is also slightly different in that they put Micro LED backlight in there, so you have like a 1:4 ratio of backlights to pixels which works pretty well to get rid of the bloom effect.

I actually use mine as a TV so I can't really say on using it as a desktop screen. Times I have used it on the desktop involved being back a good distance, and running in 1080p.

I also am looking forward to QD-OLED. Same concept except each sub pixel group has a blue LED OLED and then you have Quantum dots to make the red and green.
 
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modeonoff

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I have the Samsung Q60A 4K TV with me. I connected it and another 4K monitor to my Windows 10 PC. When playing the batman movie mentioned in the following thread, the pixilation of the TV is better sometimes but other times, it is as bad as the monitor. Especially at 0:03, lots of small checker boxes on both screens. What could be the reason? Playing the same movie on an iPad has no issue at all. On the iPad, black is solid black. No pixilation.

(113) Question - Poor image quality of IPS LCD when playing youtube video under Windows | Tom's Hardware Forum (tomshardware.com)
 
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