OLED is old news. Mini-LED is the future

Mini-LED wins on brightness

I won’t deny that OLED monitors have gotten much brighter recently, and there are even some models that offer 1,500+ nits on smaller sections of the screen. But those tend to be WOLED monitors, which lose out on the color accuracy of QD-OLED.

By contrast, the latest Mini-LED monitors offer 2,000+ nits brightness with ease, often over larger sections of the screen.

For games, videos, or anything else that you really want to pop off the screen, there’s no beating the sheer vibrancy of Mini-LED. That’s doubly true if you’re looking at it in a brighter room. Sure, some love to game in the dark for the boosted contrast and color, but if you’re like me and mostly use your monitor during the day with the curtains open—or even with harsh overhead lights—then you’ll appreciate Mini-LED.

LG

In a brightly lit environment, Mini-LED’s extra brightness makes a far bigger difference than OLED’s contrast and colors. It makes it easier to see details, reduces problems with glare, and gives you a more consistent picture quality regardless of the time of day.

And then there’s HDR gaming on PC, which is far from smooth sailing even at the best of times. You’ll get a lot of benefits from Mini-LED’s higher brightness there, too. OLED might look better on high-contrast scenes with bright highlights, but the latest Mini-LED monitors have more dimming zones that make blooming far less of an issue.

OLED contrast isn’t so standout anymore

Yes, OLED still technically offers the best contrast, but it’s not as far ahead of the competition as it once was.

The best OLED monitors today are split between WOLED and QD-OLED displays. While the former enjoy the near-infinite contrast that OLED is so well-known for—inky blacks for days—QD-OLED panels are increasingly popular for better bright color support while sacrificing only a little bit of that contrast for the trouble.

TCL

On the other hand, Mini-LED has grown from strength to strength, and the latest models with 1,000+ local dimming zones don’t suffer from blooming as much as they used to. Yes, OLED contrast will always beat Mini-LED because it has that much better control over the individual pixels, but Mini-LED is getting very close.

And in the future, Micro-LED will eliminate the gap entirely.

Response time is overrated

Look, I’m not trying to annoy anyone, but I know this point is probably going to upset the semi-pro gamers out there.

If you’re scrambling for every possible competitive advantage in your favorite esports games, you should absolutely consider OLED. But I’m pretty sure 99% of you reading this don’t care that much about besting other hyper-competitive gamers. For those of us who just play games to relax or hang out with friends, Mini-LED is plenty fast enough.

Matthew Smith / Foundry

Sure, a 0.03ms response time is going to feel faster than 1ms… by a bit. And yes, the motion clarity of OLED is going to be better because the pixels themselves can change faster…

But if you have motion blur enabled, you probably aren’t going to notice it. And if you aren’t playing ultra-fast games and haven’t already maxed out your frame rate and reduced your latency everywhere else, is response time really going to help you win your games?

Eh, I don’t think so. There’s an advantage there, but I don’t think it’s worth fretting over—not until you’ve min-maxed everything else first.

Text reads better on Mini-LED

Outside of subtitles, I’m willing to bet you’re not doing a lot of text reading on your TV. But if you’re using your monitor for anything besides gaming (and even then), I bet you are reading a lot of text! And if you’re reading a lot of text, then text clarity matters.

Amazon

Mini-LED has clearer text than OLED, period. And if your display has a resolution lower than 4K, the difference is going to be a lot more noticeable (due to the subpixel makeup of OLED and Mini-LED).

It may not be a big enough deal to warrant buying one type of monitor over another on its own, but it’s a supplementary point worth considering, especially if you expect to do a lot of reading on your monitor. In that case, Mini-LED will give you an easier time.

Burn-in isn’t a concern with Mini-LED

Burn-in has been the big boogeyman of OLED monitors and TVs for a long time. Fortunately, the situation is far better today with better pixel refresh and pixel shift technologies to mitigate issues with short-term image retention and long-term brightness control.

Foundry

But burn-in is still inevitable on OLED. It’s the nature of the technology, and it’s particularly bad on monitors due to always-on user interface elements like taskbars, game HUDs, chat app overlays, browser window outlines, etc. It’s not as bad on TVs where full-screen images are always moving and varied, but certain elements can burn in (like news tickers, channel logos, paused movies, etc.).

All of that is going to contribute to OLED burn-in over years of use. Meanwhile, it’s not something Mini-LED owners have to worry about. If you expect to run your system with lots of static images and on-screen HUDs and menus, Mini-LED will definitely last longer.

Mini-LED is king for most users

I am a firm buyer of the OLED hype. It really is gorgeous, and I’m in the market for high-contrast images and fast response times. I want the nuanced HDR of OLED and I don’t mind tweaking the way I play games to help delay the inevitable onset of burn-in.

For most people though, that’s the kind of hassle that just isn’t worth having. Most users want a bright and punchy image that’s going to look great whether the room is dark or bright with lights on or curtains open. Most users aren’t going to notice the limited blooming on modern displays with over 1,000 local dimming zones, and most users won’t notice a 1ms response time, especially when they probably don’t even turn off motion blur in games anyway.

Ultimately, Mini-LED is the future. RGB Mini-LED will rival OLED’s best color saturation and brightest pops of color, and Micro-LED will one day replace OLED entirely—it’s self-emissive like OLED but with greater brightness and reduced burn-in risk.

Mini-LED is the best choice now and its even-smaller iterations will only make this ever more true in the years to come.

Further reading: The best monitors worth buying right now