sean zhang

Initial Months Owning an OLED Display

Recently, I decided to buy a nice display for myself to treat my eyes, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts that I had using it for the first two months.

The monitor I bought is a LG 32-inch 4K OLED display that was on sale for $899.

Features #

(Full product page with specifications is available on LG’s website)

The selling points of this monitor are:

  1. It is a widescreen (16:9 aspect) display.
  2. It is 32 inches wide diagonally.
  3. It has an OLED display panel.
    • This allows your display to achieve true blacks. Each pixel in an OLED display emit their own light, so individual pixels can be turned off to get deep blacks. Most displays use LCD panels, which rely on a backlight that cannot be controlled to the pixel level to hit the same levels of blacks.
  4. It has a very high refresh rate, 240Hz.
  5. It has dual mode, where it can switch between 4K, 240 Hz and FHD, 480 Hz.
    • Practically speaking, this gives you a button on the display which switches your monitor between the two resolutions to hit even higher refresh rates. If you play a lot of games that require low latency, this will come in handy.
  6. It has a stand that can be adjusted in every way fathomable - tilt, rotate, height, and swivel.

My Experience #

I agree with reviews online, this is an excellent gaming monitor. It has super low latency in every aspect, it has a massive viewing angle, and its size and resolution will make any content you consume on here look great.

Since I am not affluent enough to have two kinds of displays for each use case, my experience will reflect my use of this monitor as my main display, meaning it will spend a lot of time as a work display. If I were to buy this monitor solely for work, I would not recommend it – there are displays designed for productivity at a lower price.

For a more well-rounded use case, I find the following trade-offs minor but worth considering before buying this display.

Text Clarity #

Since I spend a lot of time reading and writing text, it should be comfortable to look at.

If you are upgrading from a high resolution LCD display, you will notice a downgrade in text clarity. Text will look fuzzier on a comparable display at the same resolution (this may be exacerbated by the matte texture on the front).

However, it is not enough of a hindrance to impact my productivity. I found this article about text clarity on RTINGS to be particularly helpful in understanding why and how to mitigate for this issue.

Brightness #

For doing productivity in SDR, this display gets bright enough to use indoors. HDR looks fantastic on this display as well.

But if you put a high-end LCD display next to it (for example, a MacBook Pro), the OLED looks dim in comparison. Since burn-in is a constant worry for this display type, it is advised to avoid high brightness unless you are extremely confident in your warranty.

On their product page, LG advertises a 1 year burn-in warranty, which I assure you is not a very confident warranty.

Connectivity #

For the cost of this display, it lacks a lot in terms of office-friendly features. For example, I wish this display has 4 or more USB ports so I can connect my mouse, keyboard, and any other peripherals (like a webcam or microphone) through my monitor. And for the cherry on top, I wish it had USB-C power delivery with DP alt-mode so I can dock my laptop to this workstation with one cable.

However, what we get is a 2-port USB hub that connects through USB-A with no DP alt-mode. Furthermore, the USB-ports on this monitor do not deliver sufficient power to my audio interface, so I have to directly connect some power hungry peripherals directly to my PC. For those who strive to minimize the amount of cables hanging around their desk, this display will thoroughly disappoint you.

If this is a deal-breaker, other manufacturers like ASUS and MSI offer displays with more I/O. Their OLED displays have all the features I wish this display had.

Burn-in #

This is an inevitable outcome that will happen, but I have not owned the monitor for long enough to know the impact of using it for static content 8-9 hours a day. There have been tests conducted and published online about the rate of burn-in and its effects on usability, like this one from RTINGS (for TVs).

The display comes with a few screen-saving tricks up it’s sleeve. For example, it has a “pixel-shift” feature which translates your screen output a few pixels over time to prevent unevenly wearing out a specific pixel. The side-effect is uneven bezels, so this may be a feature some are not willing to enable. Other features include auto-dimming and logo dimming to prevent bright static content from wearing the screen down.

I will follow up on this once I have used my display for longer.

Built-in Speakers #

This display has built-in speakers. While they are serviceable if desperately needed, they should be avoided. Even a mobile phone will sound better than this.

Note: There is an alternate model with the model name “32GS95UE”, which has advertised better speakers. This display does not have the same speakers as that model.

My Display Settings #

There are two profiles: SDR and HDR. I do not use HDR since it’s support is experimental on my Linux desktop environment. I am documenting these in case they ever get messed up.

SDR #

Game Adjust #

Game Mode: Gamer 1

Adaptive Sync: Off

Enabling adaptive sync has caused screen flickering on my desktop. For this reason, I turn it off.

Black Stabilizer: 50

Picture #

Brightness: 50

Peak brightness: Off

Contrast: 70

Sharpness: 50

Gamma: Mode 2