No known OLED laptops or monitors with true DC dimming?

Clokwork

My Search has found that nobody makes panels like this. Due to the fact that DC dimming causes color inaccuracy, most manufacturers don’t want to implement it. Such a shame.

JTL

Clokwork From what I've seen all OLED panels have the brightness "dip" in accordance to refresh rate even without explicit PWM. That being said I don't think anyone's ever measured the old (i.e Galaxy S1/S2) OLED panels that were in use before Samsung popularized PWM dimming across the industry.

JTL

Clokwork Curiously I've seen this claim in a review of a Samsung OLED TV.

Not sure I believe it. First because Samsung, and they don't demonstrate the waveform changing.

The Samsung S95B isn't technically flicker-free, as there's a small decrease in brightness that corresponds with the refresh cycle of the display. This is very different from pulse width modulation flicker (PWM) on TVs with LED backlights, and it's not noticeable. This dip isn't even always there, and the display is flicker-free in the following modes:

PC Mode: only with the brightness at max

Dynamic Mode: brightness above 20

Standard Mode: brightness above 48

Game Mode: brightness above 25

vivsaby

Clokwork There used to be a smartphone by Samsung that had pure (true) DC DIMMING in the OLED display. I used that phone for 3 years (2011 - 2014) and to be honest at that time I was not aware of things like PWM, eye-strain, flickering of OLED etc. That smartphone is Samsung GALAXY S2. It had an OLED display with DC dimming. I used to use that phone for hours. I only came to know about its DC DIMMING capability when I searched the net for Galaxy S2 because that was the only OLED display I used for years without any eye strain issue. It is a shame that COMPANIES have removed that option and are causing SERIOUS health issues to their customers.

Clokwork

JTL good call. The only future tech I know about that could solve this is micro led, but they will find ways to mess it up for us. Micro led has the potential to stop temporal dithering too but my expectations are low. There’s that and the roadmap doesn’t seem to have panels in our hands until after 2030.

JTL

Clokwork You can allegedly buy a microLED panel for a nonrefundable payment on the order of several multiples of ten thousand dollars. Something I'd pass on. However I'd be interested to know if it were possible to view a microLED panel in a "showroom" or similar. If possible and I could visit there's a chance I could bring my oscilloscope and photodiode to conduct some measurements.

Clokwork

JTL I understanding your concern. the frame rate dip makes sense but I have my huge doubts as well that the display doesn’t utilize PWM. As far as I know, PWM is the only way for displays to keep their color accuracy. I’ll take DC dimming any day over PWM. The larger concern for me though is the Temporal dithering. I suffer from LCDs with this as well, for example any recent model ipad.

JTL

Clokwork Well, DC dimming was the subject of your post so I'm discussing what I know.

Temporal dithering and other alleged visual artifacts is a different problem.

Apple-Meta-USA

Correct!

OLED only have DC-Like-Dimming! Which is better than PWM, but still flickering.

Such as LG C2, C3 and so on!

jordan

Apple-Meta-USA isnt the dc like dimming basically just dithering ?

qb74

vivsaby
I've been interested by the Galaxy S2 for the longest.
(If anyone owns the S2 and a oscilloscope + probe, please share your findings!)
I don't personally have a oscilloscope + light probe to verify whether the display scanout related brightness drop occurs on it (as it does on OLED TV's / Monitors / Phones), but definitely interesting to test these early interations of OLED.

The terminology of "DC-Dimmed" is somewhat misinterpreted by most here.
People assume that it means the display is flicker-free, which is not the case (as seen with OLED).
Even LCD's exhibit a brightness drop during some RGB transitions, but OLED is a bit harsher in this regard.

To illustrate how much of a luminance change we're talking about, take a look at this:

This is how the luminance (brightness) drop looks like at 0% brightness on the MSI 271QRX (QD-OLED) display set to 360Hz, this behavior continues across all brightness setting levels.

This is how much it drops on the AW2725DF (same panel as the MSI), with HDR on I assume (hence the brightness being lower)
It seems to be a fixed 20-25% brightness drop

Here's the new 480Hz WOLED (Inzone M10S), 480Hz just makes the drop more frequent.
It's set to a higher brightness value, hence the drop will be harsher.

I'd love to see older OLED's and whether they exhibit this, as I haven't found any papers/studies detailing why this occurs.

Sunspark

I have one of those old S2 panels because I have a Blackberry Z30 which used one. It was a true RGB stripe panel, but by today's standards looks like crap now (has degraded and is lower resolution). I think it had mandatory content adaptive dimming which was annoying at times.

There was also a flexible plastic oled panel from LG back then as well.