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Hands-On With LG's 32-Inch UltraFine OLED Pro Display

FYI I'm using a Pro Display XDR to deliver my movie to our post facility for theatrical DCP and HDR streaming and it's fantastic. Just checked the specs for this LG monitor and despite what the reviewer says, it's IMO not suitable for 'Hollywood' deliverables since it has a sustained brightness of only 400 nits. Pro Display has 1000 nits sustained. Plus the LG's 4K resolution, although fine for a reference monitor, is a pretty low PPI if you want to have it double as a main monitor like the XDR - not to mention it likely will suffer from OLED burn-in. Pro display is still a better deal after all these years, ridiculous stand included.
 
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fs454 said:
I don't really understand why the prices and specs of these are what they are when 48" 120hz OLEDs are available for a thousand bucks and are incredible panels for the money. Suddenly when you go below 48" it becomes a "monitor" and the price and availability go haywire.
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It is because these LG professional grade monitors use a different panel pixel architecture than their televisions - true RGB vs. White RGB.

LG has a massive WRGB OLED production infrastructure so they can crank out WRGB OLED TVs for a (relatively) low cost. So the main cost driver is how many WRGB panels they can cut from a piece of "mother glass" without waste.

The professional RGB OLED monitors use a special inkjet printing process created by Japan OLED and the production scale is significantly lower so the production costs per panel are significantly higher.
 
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I wonder what it’s PWM frequency is. That is one scary monitor. It’s one thing to have an OLED TV 8 feet away from you, but entirely different to have this flickering monitor within arms reach. Ouch!
 
menithings said:
FYI I'm using a Pro Display XDR to deliver my movie to our post facility for theatrical DCP and HDR streaming and it's fantastic. Just checked the specs for this LG monitor and despite what the reviewer says, it's IMO not suitable for 'Hollywood' deliverables since it has a sustained brightness of only 400 nits. Pro Display has 1000 nits sustained. Plus the LG's 4K resolution, although fine for a reference monitor, is a pretty low PPI if you want to have it double as a main monitor like the XDR - not to mention it likely will suffer from OLED burn-in. Pro display is still a better deal after all these years, ridiculous stand included.
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Indeed. There's a reason why Apple chose mini LED for high-end and left OLED for mid-range applications.
 
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CWallace said:
Yes. LG OLED televisions use a white OLED that is then passed through either a Blue, Red or Green filter.

Samsung does something similar with their new QD-OLED panels launched by Sony, where all the pixels use a Blue OLED and then Quantum Dot technology to convert that blue light to Red and Green.

These LG professional monitors use "true" RGB OLEDs from Japan OLED with a Blue OLED, a Red OLED and a Green OLED.
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The difference is that W-RGB uses white OLED emitters and colored filters to produce the colors.

QD-OLED uses blue OLED emitters and then red and green fluorescent dots that convert the blue light and reemit it as red or green. The result is better clarify and brightness.
 
Tagbert said:
The difference is that W-RGB uses white OLED emitters and colored filters to produce the colors.

QD-OLED uses blue OLED emitters and then red and green fluorescent dots that convert the blue light and reemit it as red or green. The result is better clarify and brightness.
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thought I gotcha but now I'm confused .

why is this bad? because macOS and windows don't rly handle w-rgb very well?
 
NewUsername said:
I thought OLED was not possible for computer monitors because of burn-in?… ?
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Burn-in can be a problem for monitors due to static images. Burn-in may be less of a problem than it used to be but AFAIK it's still a problem. That is why Apple has been pushing mini-LED recently as it provides greater brightness and similar contrast to OLED without the burn-in problem at the risk of blooming at high brightness levels. None of these technologies are perfect for all use cases yet.
 
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0089294 said:
why is this bad? because macOS and windows don't rly handle w-rgb very well?
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There is nothing "bad" about W-RGB OLED ("WOLED"). LG went with it because native blue OLEDs deteriorate faster than native red and green so by using white and passing it through a filter, you don't have color shifting. Japan OLED has developed longer-lived blue OLEDs so their true RGB OLEDs have longer lifespans.

I don't recall all the specifics, but it seems that true RGB OLEDs have the best color uniformity and peak brightness, followed by QD-OLED and then WOLED.
 
ckelley said:
To minimize glare from above or other sources around it, very common in color accurate workflows.

That said, wish this monitor came with 120Hz capabilities like their OLED TVs, it would be the perfect replacement for me to have one monitor for work and play connected to my Mac and PC. The smallest OLED TV that LG makes is 48", though the 42" is coming this year it's still too big for me to use while working.
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40-43" is actually perfect for a 4k TV to be used as a computer display.
It has the same ppi as a 20/21.5" 1080p display. So it's not retina... but a good standard res.
This will give you 2 21.5" displays side by side... and two additional ones on top. Minus the bezels.
So for some cases like huge spreadsheets or videos it is perfect.

Bern using this for a few years now... perfect (and cheap) setup.
 
0089294 said:
tbf brightness of this monitor doesn't look that high either .maybe 400niys with 50% APL ,but still limited to hdr400 which imo sucks a lot

I mean ,as he said, TV can reach 800 nits or more (LG C1) in HDR mode ,which over 25% APL I think?
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Try again. HDR400 isn't even applicable to this type of screen. I doubt it's been rated yet, but at worst its TrueBlack DisplayHDR400, which "Provides up to 50X greater dynamic range and 4X improvement in rise time compared to DisplayHDR 1000". This thing would blow the vast majority of monitors out of the water.
 
DummyFool said:
It's not really on the subject but I don't understand why some professionals needs that kind of color accuracy. Maybe because I am a programmer and not an artist. I can understand that you don't want your yellows looking orange and vice versa but this kind of accuracy is probably over 50 times what my eyes could see.
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it's perfectly acceptable to just say to yourself "this isn't for me" and move on with your life instead of saying this.
 
NBAasDOGG said:
LG OLED TVs use garbage W-RGB pixels and this monitor uses native RGB pixel layout. Huge difference when it comes to motion, image and text clarity.
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no.

IQ wiseit would be near impossible to tell the difference between this monitor and a wrgb OLED set to 400 nits unless side-by-side.

"text clarity" wise the panels would be completely indistinguishable from one another.

Motion completely indistinguishable
 
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fs454 said:
I don't really understand why the prices and specs of these are what they are when 48" 120hz OLEDs are available for a thousand bucks and are incredible panels for the money. Suddenly when you go below 48" it becomes a "monitor" and the price and availability go haywire. I understand that some of these are reference style monitors for color accurate work but that doesn't quite explain why there aren't 24-32" OLEDs for mass market consumption without a hefty pro price tag. Is it just impossible to make these with the same yield due to the pixel density on smaller panels or something? Doesn't seem to hold Apple and the other manufacturers back from making large screen OLED phones and tablets.
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Linus has a good explanation. It's a little dated (2018) but it hits the big points.
 
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venom600 said:
Try again. HDR400 isn't even applicable to this type of screen. I doubt it's been rated yet, but at worst its TrueBlack DisplayHDR400, which "Provides up to 50X greater dynamic range and 4X improvement in rise time compared to DisplayHDR 1000". This thing would blow the vast majority of monitors out of the water.
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that's what I have seen from notebook check (and another source which I don't recall now)

hmm I gotta check about it ,rise time as in pixel response times ? I don't get it lol
 
Screen Shot 2022-01-12 at 5.11.39 PM.png
 
Most people aren't mastering on LCD/LED or mini LED like Pro Display XDR.

I know a poster above said he is, and that's great. But with the apple XDR specifically it cannot be used due to its non-uniform brightness and vignette effect at the corners of the screen. This is fairly well documented and present in every display.

One of the reasons why the 48" LG oled (and now the 42" oled) are so popular is for exact reason is that you're getting 98% of the performance out of a $1500 TV compared to a $20-50k Sony mastering OLED monitor.
 
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