OLED Not for Me

Summary

When I switched from an iMac to a Mac mini in late 2024 I choose an ASUS ProArt 5K PA27JCV (24″, 60 Hz) for the monitor and while it looked great, it died after 14 months, seemingly with a backlight or power supply problem. ASUS’ warranty support requires shipping the monitor back, potentially waiting 3-4 weeks, and then getting a replacement. And worse, the replacement could have dead pixels, as the ASUS warranty doesn’t consider ≤5 dark pixels a problem. The old HP ZR2440w that I swapped in as a spare wasn’t cutting it, so with an indeterminate wait ahead of me, potentially receiving something with bad pixels, and my being vaguely interested in something larger and with a faster refresh rate I went looking at new monitors. Coming to the realization that 4K is probably fine I picked up a Dell 32 Plus 4K QD-OLED Monitor – S3225QC from Costco for $499. It was well reviewed online and looked pretty good when I played with one for about 20 minutes at Micro Center. When I got home and sat in front of it doing my normal things it looked a bit… different… almost as if my glasses weren’t working quite right. But I figured new monitor tech just needed some time for me to get accustomed to. After all, it had a very high contrast ratio and sharp pixels; maybe it’s just that? After a few days it still didn’t feel right, so I began looking for a solution. Costco has a 90-day return window for computer monitors, so I had some time, but this didn’t look good; I wanted an answer soon. I was fortunate to be able to borrow a Dell UltraSharp 32 4K USB-C Hub Monitor U3223QE for the weekend, which was perfect as being a being a high end display with the same resolution and panel size as the S3225QC I could compare them side by side. And in the end the LCD just looked better. Dell S3225QC QD-OLED Dell U3223QE LCD I took some macro photos of both displays and it turns out that what was bothering me was fringing, a problem common to OLEDs. It was hard to point out during normal use other ...