Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OLED, Not for Me

nuxx.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 221 posts

Re: OLED, Not for Me

#111

Post by girvo »

magicalhippo wrote: post #62
girvo wrote: post #11

As the article states, this is why RGB Stripe layouts are the next big things in OLED. Quite exciting, and sub pixel layouts that aren't good for text are exactly why I have an XG27AQMR in front of me for work/gaming instead of an OLED (27" IPS LCD, 1440p, 300hz)

I upgraded my 27" 1440p LCD to a 27" 4k OLED (PG27UCDM) and for me text rendering was a big upgrade. Yes there is color fringing if I take a zoomed in picture with my camera, but nothing I notice in day to day use. And I've been highly annoyed by missing or bad ClearType rendering. I specifically went for the 27" to get the extra pixel density though. I might not have been happy with the 32" variant. That said, the t…

Yeah I'm quite excited to move to the 34" ultra-wide 1440p RGB stripe 360hz monitor they announced! OLED is an amazing technology, and this was IMO the final barrier to overcome to beat IPS on nearly all axes.

Re: OLED, Not for Me

#112

Post by wildredkraut »

vlabakje90 wrote: post #47
jonny_eh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely there’s some work out there that tries to improve font rendering on nonuniform subpixel layouts, right? Only Microsoft can fix it, and as far as I know, they don't seem interested.

Others can fix it too and they have. See: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype https://github.com/CoolOppo/GDI-PlusPlus I use MacType and it works really well. You can tune many more things than with ClearType.

Same here, running MacType/Windows on a 65" LG 4k OLED C5 TV with 100% scaling as my main display for all kind of stuff incl. coding. But i must admit that fonts on Linux looks noticeable better out of the box and MacType/Windows does not apply to all applications. E.g. for LibreOffice i had to change the rendering engine(disable skia) under options and on PDFGear MacType does not apply at all.

Anyway, OLED is great, I'm sitting 2 arm length away from the panel.

People complaining are probably Gen.Z that never sat in-front of an ol' CRT in the 90s and are spoiled by smartphones running 4k on minuscule 7" displays with 460ppi.

Re: OLED, Not for Me

#114

Post by nkrisc »

nasmorn wrote: post #105
rabf wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people ask what computer they should buy I always tell them to get any old office computer from ebay and use the rest of the money to buy a really nice monitor, and a really nice keyboard and mouse, as these are the bits you use! For most tasks that are undertaken on a computer any processor from the last 10 years coupled with 16GB of ram is more than sufficient.

If you buy a really nice monitor, which for me starts at 6K 32” - the eBay computer will no longer drive it. What I find insane is how long companies issued 19” 1080 screens to their employees. I don’t think that was a well calculated choice given that a couple of hundred more over 5 years would have surely improved productivity by a little bit for their 50k year employees. It felt almost done out of spite to keep pe…

A 6K monitor seems like complete overkill unless you’re editing 4K video or sitting way too close to it.

Re: OLED, Not for Me

#115

Post by martini333 »

on_the_train wrote: post #51
dleslie wrote: post #8

This was a validating read. I used a Samsung G9 OLED for the better part of a year and eventually had to stop because the eye strain was terrible. I found myself avoiding my desk because it was a chore to look at the display. I've moved back to using a pair of 4K LCDs that I had, and honestly the resolution and aspect ratio are better for text and programming anyhow.

LCD is just the better technology. Besides what this article is about, OLED have awful burning and longevity problems. They're great for watching movies on the first month (and that's what gets them sold), but really not much else.

lol

Re: OLED, Not for Me

#116

Post by debazel »

vlabakje90 wrote: post #47
jonny_eh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely there’s some work out there that tries to improve font rendering on nonuniform subpixel layouts, right? Only Microsoft can fix it, and as far as I know, they don't seem interested.

Others can fix it too and they have. See: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype https://github.com/CoolOppo/GDI-PlusPlus I use MacType and it works really well. You can tune many more things than with ClearType.

I've tried MacType before but sadly it came with significant slow down in many applications, lists would lag while scrolling, etc.

It's really annoying because all I really want is to disable ClearType on my primary high DPI monitor while keeping it with default settings for my two side monitors, but Windows does not let you configure it per monitor.

Re: OLED, Not for Me

#117

Post by Mashimo »

ksec wrote: post #46
aappleby wrote: post #18

This guy is complaining about fringing...on 9- and 10-pixel high fonts. That works out to 1.6mm or 1.8mm high characters on a 140 dpi screen, or about 1/16 of an inch. He's also got Cleartype on and set to RGB stripe even though the OLED is not RGB stripe (though to be fair, Windows doesn't really make it clear what each page of the ClearType tuner does). But yeah, if you use a _tiny_ font and sit _really_ close to t…

My Friend on a 30Hz Phone Screen because of battery saving mode said the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz is so minor, that in "In practice, it's been unnoticeable." At one point in time 95%+ of HN comments were cheering on about Atom the text editor and later VSCode as being fast enough or unnoticeable. When Sublime user are baffled as to why. And Sublime isn't the fastest text editor either before Zed came out. Yes…

At work I'm using IntelliJ IDEA through a windows remote connection, loaded with a 20 year old java project that got bigger and bigger of the years :D

I kind of want to see one of the Atom vs Sublime people use that for a hot minute.

At home I upgraded from 60hz to 165hz and was underwhelmed. I see the difference .. but eh.

Re: OLED, Not for Me

#118

Post by bluecalm »

ksec wrote: post #46
aappleby wrote: post #18

This guy is complaining about fringing...on 9- and 10-pixel high fonts. That works out to 1.6mm or 1.8mm high characters on a 140 dpi screen, or about 1/16 of an inch. He's also got Cleartype on and set to RGB stripe even though the OLED is not RGB stripe (though to be fair, Windows doesn't really make it clear what each page of the ClearType tuner does). But yeah, if you use a _tiny_ font and sit _really_ close to t…

My Friend on a 30Hz Phone Screen because of battery saving mode said the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz is so minor, that in "In practice, it's been unnoticeable." At one point in time 95%+ of HN comments were cheering on about Atom the text editor and later VSCode as being fast enough or unnoticeable. When Sublime user are baffled as to why. And Sublime isn't the fastest text editor either before Zed came out. Yes…

Out of curiosity can you tell the difference in font rendering on a 14 inch laptop between 1920x1200 LCD screen and a higher resolution one? I mean during normal work in normal position not trying to look really close.

Re: OLED, Not for Me

#119

Post by bluecalm »

carlob wrote: post #83
ksec wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a point in time ( may be 15+ years ago ) I said MacBook have the best laptop speakers and that was one of the reason I brought them. They are not perfect, as any people who cares about audio will tell you but considering the size of laptop they were the best I could get and decent enough. Most of my friends, and nearly everyone on the internet was like, who buys Laptops because of speakers? They all sounded…

At some point a few years ago I didn't want to get a mac with the crappy keyboard so I bought a Thinkpad, I think it was a t480s or something of that era. The speakers were so bad it was impossible to understand the dialogue while watching a movie in a decently quiet room with some city noises in the background.

I have a newer Thinkpad (T14, Ryzen 6850) and while the sound is clear it's shameful how much better my wife's Macbook Air is. I only headphones now. I can't unhear it.

Re: OLED, Not for Me

#120

Post by torginus »

aappleby wrote: post #18

This guy is complaining about fringing...on 9- and 10-pixel high fonts. That works out to 1.6mm or 1.8mm high characters on a 140 dpi screen, or about 1/16 of an inch. He's also got Cleartype on and set to RGB stripe even though the OLED is not RGB stripe (though to be fair, Windows doesn't really make it clear what each page of the ClearType tuner does). But yeah, if you use a _tiny_ font and sit _really_ close to t…

I used to work on custom embedded UIs that supported fractional scaling. This shit is hard.

You have to understand there's enormous effort that needs to go into this to make things look good. It's absolutely no surprise to me that Jobs era Apple used to stick to integer scaling ratios with relatively low-res phones while the competition battled with paper specs.

The trick to make things look good is to be mindful of the pixel grid, (and the subpixel layout). You have to choose font spacing and fonts so that major font features line up with the pixel grid. You sometimes have to slide a letter a bit to the left or right, which might result in inconsistent spacing, you might even want to have multiple versions of characters to hide these issues.

This applies to borders as well (both spacing and thickness).

Sometimes you can't make it look good no matter what you try - and the designer has to change it.

While flexbox and other super-duper layout algorithms might be very clever, if you use them, there's no way to line things up perfectly, and if you expect to, you might be in a world of hurt.

Adding PPI is a poor way to fix this. Even if you 2x the resolution, going from 1080p, to 4K, these issues still persist, and you quickly run out of hardware beyond that.

There's no wonder why modern 'flat' UIs usually have 1-2 pixel-ish gradients on edges of features, or use smooth transitions, it's a cop out - but that's the only thing that works with flexible layout, different pixel densities. But subtly, you notice things looking a bit blurry, just as if the images were low-res, even though the pixel density is insane.

ClearType is brilliant, but it only works with a certain set of assumptions, like a bit of light bleed (which exists on LCD but not on OLED afaik), and needs to know the subpixel layout, and can result in absolutely gorgeous looking fonts with relatively low res displays.

There's a reason why Windows 95-era UIs have a cult following - it's insane how sharp they looked even on hardware that on paper is much worse than modern stuff.

Post reply on HN