I have a desktop with two monitors. Both monitors are typical 60 Hz IPS displays, one is 24’ and the other is 27’. About two years ago, I thought of upgrading my main monitor to something better. In particular, I wanted high refresh rate (HRR) and variable refresh rate (VRR). I did some searching for what goes into a good monitor and saw what was available. The results were rather surprising: you can’t just spend a lot of money to get a solid monitor. The subreddit dedicated to monitors was complaining about all other electronics having better screens, all monitor display types have some key weakness to them, monitor manufacturers were allocating their efforts into the wrong areas, buying a monitor meant buying into a QC lottery, and all of the good display technology is excluded from monitors.
It’s important to know that the problems mentioned above aren’t so terrible that they harm user experience (except the QC lottery), they’re complaints from an enthusiast level. You can give an average person an expensive monitor and they might think it’s the best display they’ve ever used. Once you dig deeper and get more technical, that’s when the big flaws of the desktop monitor space appear. And ultimately, the monitor subreddit has several valid points.
All LCD panels have drawbacks
The most common type of display panel used in devices is the liquid crystal display (LCD), due to its cost advantages and thinness. LCDs are most common on TVs, laptops, and monitors; phones and tablets are increasingly using OLED panels, which will be discussed later. LCDs work in the following way:
- White light is emitted from an LED panel, called the backlight
- A layer of liquid crystals sits in front of the backlight. When electricity is sent through the crystals, they change orientation and polarize the white light. In other words, they block out some of the light. Block all the light to get black, block certain frequencies to get colours, don’t block at all to get white
- This blockage of light is what you see on screen
The liquid crystal layer in LCDs come in three versions: TN, IPS, and VA. The variants have crystal layers that behave slightly differently, which affects monitor properties and all have unique problems.
TN (Twisted Nematic)
TN panels are cheap, have bad viewing angles and colour, and are responsive. If you go looking for the cheapest monitors, it’s likely they’ll all have TN panels listed in their specifications. You probably know that looking at cheap displays from the side makes the colours distorted. This problem is inherent to LCDs, but is especially bad in TN panels. These panels also have bad contrast, so blacks will look like dark grey and pictures are washed out.
The only two reasons to use a TN monitor is either you don’t have any money or you need a 360 Hz monitor for some reason. TN is the only LCD panel responsive enough to get these ridiculous refresh rates since the crystals in TN panels take less time to orient themselves than in IPS and VA. Because of this, TN panels are typically marketed for esports or “pro” gaming. Other than that, there’s no reason to use TN panels; they have poor colour, contrast, and viewing angles. You’re better off using a CRT TV instead.
IPS (In-Plane Switching)
IPS is the most common LCD panel type and generally considered the jack of all trades. Versus TN, it has much better colours, contrast, and viewing angles. If you looked at any IPS display, nothing would stand out as bad; there would be no colour and contrast distortion unlike TN panels, pictures and motion look fine, and the refresh rate is ok too. IPS isn’t as responsive as TN, but it can still reliably hit 120 Hz without GtG problems (how responsive pixels are).
IPS’s biggest problem is contrast. While better than TN, it is far below the contrast of VA or OLED panels. Contrast is typically measured as a ratio of how dark a pixel can get to how bright it can get, expressed as a number like 1:1000. IPS panels tend to have contrast ratios of 1:1000 but can get as low as 1:800, which is very noticeable. Good TVs don’t use IPS panels for this reason, watching movies with low contrast can ruin the film. There are some IPS TVs out there, go compare the contrast difference between it and a VA TV; the different is drastic.
VA (Vetical Alignment)
Good TVs use VA panels. This panel has the best contrast, equal colours and slightly worse viewing angles than IPS, and is the slowest. VA’s contrast is much better than IPS, often with minimum ratios of 1:2000 and sometimes reaching over 1:3000. So in theory, VA panels should give you the best picture quality if you sit directly in front of the screen. Once you start moving, the colours and contrast can look off.
VA’s biggest problem is it’s sluggishness, and not in a refresh rate limit sense. VA panels have a well known problem called “black smearing”, which is exactly what it sounds like. When a pixel transitions from black to grey, the crystals in VA panels take a while to move; black text or shapes on the screen literally look like they are smearing on the screen. This problem cripples VA panel performance but can be mitigated; Samsung proved that with their high end VA panels that can reliably do 240 Hz. However, these monitors are expensive, have very strong curvature, and QC on them is quite bad.
Black smearing is found on virtually every other panel besides that one model from Samsung, so you will see it on other VA monitors. As most high end TVs use VA panels, the problem could also be present there but I suspect it lies within panels found on cheaper monitors. Whatever the case may be, a non-flagship VA display will have problems like black smearing that can actually ruin user experience.
LCD is a flawed technology
All the panels that go into desktop monitors have issues that can’t be brute forced with money. These problems stem from LCD technology itself, which sadly won the battle against plasma displays which were more expensive but were superior displays.
Another kicker of LCD is its inability to display true black; it’ll always be a very, very dark grey even on the best VA panel. This is because the LED backlight can’t be turned off, otherwise the whole screen turns off. Recent TVs have attempted to resolve this by allowing certain parts of the LED panel to dim (local dimming) and produce deeper blacks, but this is still not true black and local dimming is not present in monitors.
This is the state of the panels in desktop monitors. However, the problem gets worse from here.
Monitor manufacturers are focusing on the wrong features
For unknown reasons, manufacturers seem to think there are only two types of people looking for monitors: professionals who need colour-calibrated screens, and l33t gam3rz that want 1000 Hz displays. This divides the monitor market into three groups: a very small segment of very expensive (> $2000) monitors intended for colour-sensitive work and have good panels, a larger segment filled with “gaming” monitors that purely focus on HRR and neglect all other aspects of what makes a good monitor, and a middle ground market meant for average Joe who uses Excel.
The illogical obsession with refresh rate
Just like how seeing 60 fps makes 30 fps insufferable, it’s very hard to go back to 60 Hz after trying HRR screens (> 90 ~ 120 Hz). HRR also has tangible benefits in gaming, to a certain extent. The monitor draws pictures faster, so your inputs appear earlier and you can react better in PvP games. Because of this, the upper end of HRR displays tend to be at nutty refresh rates of 360 Hz or even higher. Many middle ground monitors use 60 Hz and the target audience gradually shifts to gamers as prices increase. Most high end monitors are targeted towards gamers, so they follow the increasing refresh rate pattern.
And in the process, they neglect other features that make a monitor good. A monitor is a display, it’s supposed to display pictures the best it can. The ideal monitor would be a small version of a premium TV; has HRR, infinite contrast (true blacks), great colours, no LCD problems like viewing angles or black smearing, and so on. But this isn’t the case, monitors are far behind this level of quality.
Gaming monitors miss virtually everything except HRR. The panels used are inferior to those used in even midrange TVs, so you get worse colour and contrast. Even the claimed 240 Hz refresh rate of these monitors isn’t as good as it sounds. Because the liquid crystals take time to move, sometimes they’ll take longer to move than it takes to draw a new frame. When this happens, you get frames that look weird, this is called ghosting. You can feed more voltage to the crystals to make them move faster, but then they move too fast or imprecisely and you get ghosting again.
So in short, a high end monitor is inferior to even midrange TVs. The TV’s panel will destroy the monitor’s easily, just go into a electronic retailer and compare. TVs will always look better than monitors; better colours, contrast, motion quality. The only advantage monitors had over TVs were higher refresh rates and lower latency, but that has been eroded away as TVs have also become perfectly capable of playing games. Now the only advantage monitors have is their smaller size, but can that even be considered one?
Matte screens
Look at a random selection of laptop screens, and you’ll notice that some have glossy screens and others are matte. Do the same for monitors, and you’ll realize that an overwhelming majority are matte. The reasoning for matte screens is to reduce glare and reflection, which glossy screens are know to exhibit. This seems like a reasonable justification, until you realize that matte screens worsen picture quality.
Have you ever seen a matte TV, and why is the answer no? It’s because TVs focus on the viewing experience, and worsening that directly kills the product’s value. What about phones or tablets, ever seen matte screens on those? Probably not. Matte screens reduce glare, sure. But this implies that nearly all phones should have matte screens because phones are used outside constantly. So what’s the justification now for monitors, which are stationed inside permanently?
There is none, frankly. Matte screens are a deal breaker for me, and is why 90% of the monitors on the market are instant no-buys. The image quality reduction is easily noticeable, colours are less vibrant on matte screens and images are blurrier. Matte screens are a trend I wish would go away.
The panel lottery
So far I’ve explained that monitors have worse picture and general quality than TVs, and they are plagued with matte screens. What could get worse than worse image quality on a display? Say hi to the panel lottery.
The panel lottery refers to the incredible inconsistency of monitor QC. Buy two from the same model at the same store and both can look different; one might have a less defective panel, the colour calibration might be off (one monitor looks more tinted than the other), or one of them is just dead on arrival. Even if the hardware is fine, the monitor’s software might be incomplete or have bugs that prevent features from working or cause intolerable problems like flickering. In short, you’re involuntarily playing a lottery when you buy a monitor. It’s not too horrible, the odds of buying a dead monitor isn’t ½. But the inconsistent QC means that each product will have variances, sometimes easily noticeable by eye.
Lack of innovation
I’ll finish off my complaints against monitors with this argument: the lack of innovation. Like I said earlier, the advantage monitors held over TVs were higher refresh rate and better responsiveness. For instance, playing smash bros on a cheap TV several years old is unbearable due to the input lag. However, TVs have evolved and improved unlike monitors. TVs get better panels every year and playing smash bros on the LG OLED TV I own feels no different than playing it on a monitor.
The monitor market hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s mostly been a rehash of the same features, maybe marginally improved annually. You can take a 5 year old monitor and compare it to its most recent successor, maybe the only difference will be the I/O specs. The market is stagnant, which exacerbates the flaws because nothing is improving. In fact, you can even argue that the market has become worse as manufacturers continue to obsess about refresh rates and nothing more.
In short, the market for desktop monitors is frustrating to search through. You can’t spend tons of money to avoid problems; even the most expensive product has significant flaws, manufacturers don’t care about important features, QC is all over the place, and nothing is improving. It’s tiring to look at, especially when other displays found on TVs, laptops, and phones are much better. It’s not as if LCD panels are all we have!
The holy grail of displays
Let’s take a look in TV land where everything is better. LCD technology is ubiquitous now, but starting several years ago OLED technology started becoming mainstream (very common on phones, known as AMOLED). OLED is steadily replacing LCD and solves virtually all the problems that it has. Nowadays, OLED is commonly used; in a majority of phones, high end TVs, and is creeping into laptops and very expensive monitors targetting professionals. It’s very frustrating to see this improved technology not being implemented in mainstream monitors.
A stopgap solution - OLED
OLED stands for ‘organic LED’, and is exactly what the name suggests. OLED displays use organic materials that light up for each pixel and therefore does not use a liquid crystal layer and backlight. The individually illuminating pixels give OLEDs many advantages over LCD panels. First, each LED can be controlled individually. This means that some LEDs can be turned off while others are on, giving true blacks and infinite contrast. Since OLEDs don’t use a liquid crystal layer, viewing angle does not impact colour or contrast. Also, OLED is fast; it can reach refresh rates much higher than LCD panels and does not have the black smearing problems VA panels do.
We have just fixed all of the problems plaguing LCD panels. No more viewing angles issues, washed out colours and weak contrast, and slow pixel transitions. OLED seems like a holy grail by itself, and it nearly is. The best TVs use OLED panels and you can tell that they are on a higher level of quality. Even smaller scale AMOLED displays on phones are infinitely better than LCDs because AMOLED can display pure black and is much more vibrant. OLED can also be designed much thinner and be bendable because there is no liquid crystal layer or backlight. It’s just a sheet of LEDs.
OLED has one key weakness which prevents it from being the holy grail of display panels: burn in. Because of the organic nature of the LEDs, they wear out with use. If you displayed a static image on an OLED display for long enough, you would eventually see that image slightly burnt in when watching something else. It doesn’t need to be a static image either, you can watch a show that has its logo in a fixed location for long enough, and you’ll get the burn in too. Burn in immunity is the only advantage LCD has over OLED besides costs.
When you use an OLED (or AMOLED) display, you need to accept that the screen has a set lifetime before deterioriating. Modern OLEDs have vastly improved and burn in is a much smaller problem these days; some OLED TV owners claim no burn in after consistent usage for a few years. However, burn in is an unavoidable downside of OLED displays due to their nature; use one long enough and there will be wear. The true holy grail display is one immune to burn in, for then the display would have no flaws.
Nevertheless, OLED and AMOLED displays are very common in TVs and phones and are now emerging in laptops. Seeing the monitor market stuck with plain LCD panels is disappointing, the image quality difference between OLED and LCD is night and day. Lots of people are willing to have the limited lifespan of OLEDs in desktop monitors, but manufacturers don’t seem to be aware or don’t care. This is why I said in the opening heading “the best monitor is a high end TV”; there’s no comparison between a desktop monitor and an OLED TV.
The grail - micro LED
And so we arrive at the holy grail, the display technology to rule all others: micro LEDs. The name is once again, self explanatory. A micro LED (μLED) display consists of tiny, inorganic LEDs. They function exactly like how OLED does but without burn in. μLEDs are also fast, give infinite contrast, have no viewing angle problems, and have great colour.
μLEDs additionally offer a notable advantage over OLED: brightness. Due to the organic nature, there’s a limit to how bright OLED pixels can be. It’s bright enough for virtually all situations, but a relatively low limit does exist and OLED burns in faster when it is brighter. μLEDs on the other hand can be much brighter and is still immune to burn in; there’s virtually no flaw with the technology itself.
The only problem with μLED displays is that no mainstream product exists right now. This technology is in its infancy and will take several years to become mass produceable. μLED TVs do technically exist, except they’re very big (> 90’) because we can’t make the microscopic LEDs yet, and are extraordinarily expensive (> $100 000). The technology will cheapen over time just like how OLED evolved from lab samples to mainstream TVs, but it’ll take many years before you see μLED TVs for under $10 000.
A middle ground alternative you might hear about is mini LED, but this is misleading. Mini LED is essentially regular LCD panels with lots of local dimming on the backlight. It can get close to OLEDs, but is still LCD at the end of the day. Don’t fall for marketing hype.
Returning to reality
So as the adventure through display technology is over, I come back to the disappointing reality of desktop monitors. They’re all mediocre; nothing horribly wrong, but nothing great either. The most expensive gaming monitors sell for more than a premium TV, all the midrange monitors are disappointing, and there hasn’t been any noticeable progress for several years. This is why I caved in and eventually settled for an OLED TV, it really obliterates every monitors I’ve seen. Even those high end Samsung VA monitors don’t hold up against good TVs. I can dream that one day, OLED monitors (or maybe even μLED) monitors will exist and the market will have improved from its current state. Or maybe it won’t, and all I can do is keep using TVs for good displays.