- LG Display OLEDs Achieve “100% Dimming Consistency” Certification from UL Solutions
- OLED manages the different brightness zones more coherently than backlit ones
- In one way or another, the AI was also put to the test
LG Display’s OLED panels for TVs and monitors have achieved what the company claims is an industry first: they have been certified as having “100% dimming consistency” by a third party, UL Solutions. For comparison, LCD panels only achieved a maximum of 83%, with some only reaching 43%.
According to LG Display, OLED is even better than next-generation mini-RGB LED technology. And also that it is “the optimal choice in the age of AI”.
I have no doubt that LG’s panels prevailed in this test. But I have a few questions.
If LG OLED is the winner, who was the competitor?
The first and most obvious question is: what is being measured here? And helpfully, LG explained it when announcing its victory. Dimming consistency is a measurement based on setting a reference area at the center of the screen, measuring the maximum and minimum brightness, then reducing the measured area to 1/10th of the panel, then to 11/1000th of the panel, through 5/1000th, and finally down to 2/1000th.
If the minimum and maximum brightness levels remain the same between measurements, you achieve high dimming consistency. But if it varies, that means the dimming is more variable depending on the window size.
Given that OLEDs don’t use a backlight and have very small self-emissive pixels, then of course one would expect an OLED to do very well in a test that, frankly, might as well have been called “Is this an OLED?” test. LG’s OLEDs got full marks.
The second question is: what panels were tested and what size were they? We don’t have this information, so while a consistency score of 43% for LCD seems bad, we don’t know if we’re comparing like for like, if we’re comparing the same panel sizes, or if we’re comparing the high-end OLED with the low-end LCD (presumably).
Even though we assume the test treats mini-RGB LED as a premium LCD panel option, there are different levels of RGB panels. Companies like Hisense and TCL offer more budget options as well as premium options.
Next thought: where is the QD-OLED in this test? LG Display’s OLEDs are the first to score 100% in this test, but is that partly because the other technology likely to score 100%, also made by rival Samsung Display, isn’t included?
And I have the same thoughts about micro-LED screens. Again, one would assume that this would score 100%, given that it is also self-emissive, but that doesn’t seem to be included.
And finally, I’m perplexed by this: LG Display says that “This further highlights OLED as the optimal display for connecting humans and AI. In the age of AI, high luminance, high resolution, and high color gamut performance are essential,” which is an odd claim for a technology widely used for typing things into a prompt.
And this sentence may sound like an overly simplistic joke on my part, but LG also said, “Having achieved 100% dimming consistency, OLED can deliver the rich visual information generated by AI naturally and accurately,” which really doesn’t sound like a boast that text looks good on OLED. Which I suppose is the case.
For all my scoffing, I think this is interesting information, even if it mostly preaches to the converted: There’s a reason why so many of the best TVs for all budgets in our guides are OLED. There’s no doubt that good OLEDs can deliver better contrast consistency than backlit TVs.
But the margin between the best of each technology is getting smaller and smaller, and it probably feels like more and more specific tests are being used to make OLED seem more clearly superior.
The best TVs for every budget
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