The Unsettling Truth About Display Technology: A Journey into AMOLED and LCD

As we delve into the world of display technology, one thing becomes apparent: LCD screens have long been considered the more robust option. But what sets them apart from their AMOLED counterparts? To answer this question, let's start by examining the fundamental differences between these two technologies.

Shadows Boosting Gamma: A Double-Edged Sword

When we look at shadows on a display, we're often boosting gamma to make the image darker. However, this process has an unexpected side effect: it makes the colors more saturated. On the other hand, reducing gamma results in brighter images, but at the cost of decreased color saturation. The key here is that the relationship between gamma and color saturation is not straightforward. A higher gamma setting can indeed make shadows appear darker, but it also risks making the image look washed out or over-saturated. This trade-off highlights the importance of finding the optimal balance in display settings.

Dynamic Contrast: A Feature with Unintended Consequences

One feature that's become increasingly common in modern displays is Dynamic Contrast. While its intention is to adjust contrast depending on the content, it can often have the opposite effect: making colors appear washed out, particularly in midtones and highlights. This is because dynamic contrast can be overly aggressive, leading to an unnatural color palette. The result is a display that's more attention-grabbing than accurate.

The Limitations of AMOLED Technology

AMOLED technology has gained popularity in recent years due to its vibrant colors and sleek designs. However, it also comes with some inherent limitations. One of the biggest issues with AMOLED displays is blue pixel burning. This phenomenon occurs when static images are displayed for extended periods, causing the blue sub-pixels to degrade over time. As a result, burn-in can become apparent, leading to ghosting or lines appearing on the screen. While this issue is not unique to AMOLED displays, it's more pronounced in these devices due to their high energy requirements.

The Robustness of LCD Screens

In contrast to AMOLED displays, LCD screens are often considered more robust and less prone to burn-in. This is because LCDs use a backlight, which reduces the risk of burn-in compared to AMOLEDs' light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Additionally, LCDs tend to have a lower energy requirement than AMOLEDs, which means they're less susceptible to degradation over time.

The Impact of Pixel Sub-Pixels

When it comes to display technology, pixel sub-pixels play a crucial role. In LCD screens, each pixel is made up of three sub-pixels: red, green, and blue. This allows for true color reproduction and high contrast ratios. However, AMOLED displays use a different approach, with each pixel consisting of three sub-pixels that can be combined to produce a wider range of colors.

Burn-In: A Major Concern for AMOLED Displays

One major concern with AMOLED displays is burn-in. This phenomenon occurs when static images are displayed for extended periods, causing the pixels to degrade over time. Burn-in can result in ghosting or lines appearing on the screen, which can be distracting and affect image quality. While this issue is not unique to AMOLED displays, it's more pronounced in these devices due to their high energy requirements.

The Importance of Calibration

Proper calibration is essential for achieving optimal display performance. This involves adjusting settings such as gamma, color temperature, and contrast to ensure that the display produces accurate and natural colors. Calibrating an LCD screen can be a bit more straightforward than calibrating an AMOLED display, but it's still crucial for ensuring optimal image quality.

The Verdict: A Preference for LCD Screens

As someone who's had their fair share of experience with various display technologies, I must confess that my preference is for LCD screens. While AMOLED displays offer vibrant colors and sleek designs, the risks associated with blue pixel burning and burn-in cannot be ignored. In contrast, LCD screens are often more robust and less prone to these issues, making them a better choice for those who value display accuracy and longevity.

Conclusion

The world of display technology is complex and multifaceted. While AMOLED displays offer impressive color reproduction and sleek designs, they also come with their own set of limitations and concerns. By understanding the trade-offs involved in display technology, we can make informed decisions about which type of screen to choose for our needs. Whether you're a tech enthusiast or simply someone looking for accurate image quality, it's essential to consider the pros and cons of each display technology before making a decision.

A Final Word

As I conclude this article, I'd like to emphasize the importance of being aware of the potential limitations and concerns associated with different display technologies. By doing so, we can make informed decisions that prioritize our needs and preferences. Whether you're in the market for a new phone or simply looking to upgrade your current display, it's essential to consider the trade-offs involved in each technology. With this knowledge, you'll be better equipped to navigate the world of display technology and find the perfect screen for your needs.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody this is Erica the technology nerd who likes to film stuff and before me I have a couple different types of phones with different types of displays and what I want to talk about today is the truth about AMOLED versus LCD but before I do that there's a fun melodramatic little disclaimer that I want to read to you all because I realized that videos like this can cause quite volatile reactions so here we have it right here it says the following cont content is meant for educational purposes only it is not meant to cause anger aggressiveness or nashing of teeth it is not meant to cause Envy boastfulness or fanboyism of any kind everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion or preference as what I'm about to show you is really about a matter of taste so that was fun let's move on so for my little guinea pigs for this video I have the HTC1 I've got a Galaxy S4 I've also got two LG g2s for two very different markets this is the AT&T version for the American market and this is the Korean version for the Korean market and I really wanted to thank negri electronics for sending this device out to me to look at it's been very helpful in this video If you're looking for unlocked devices that aren't on carriers or even if you want a carrier device I recommend going over and looking at what negri Electronics has I have bought from them before they are a very excellent company they have really excellent customer service and they are a company that I really trust to get my devices from so thank you NRI for sending this out to me to look at so when talking about AMOLED versus LCD displays and which one is better which one's more pretty which one's more accurate which one's more natural there's just so much information floating around out there and the most annoying thing that I am hearing from bloggers and different media channels is that LCD displays have an added advantage over AMOLED because they are more natural or dare I say some say more accurate is that true are LCD displays more accurate than AMOLED well in general yes it's very true that this can be more accurate and this can be more natural looking especially if calibrated correctly the reason for that is that all the content that we see these days whether it be on the internet whether it be your operating system whether it be the operating system on your Android or your iPhone it's all based around this one color range or gamut color gamut that is called srgb or standard RGB so since the LCD display color range is matching with the srgb color range things can look more natural than what you see on AMOLED displays because Amed displays are able to display a very large range of colors much larger than srgb so when you take srgb content and display it on an AMOLED display things can look really oversaturated it's a problem right now because we don't have any type of color Management on AMOLED displays or wider gamut displays and color management would help take those very saturated colors that you're seeing on an AMOLED display and make it look the way it's supposed to or not so saturated but right now nobody is doing that another thing about AMOLED and it looks like Samsung is finally getting a clue about this is that not only does it already have a wider gamut and can make some srgb content look really oversaturated Samsung would take the saturations that are already further than us RGB and they would saturate it even more so it would take colors and completely destroy them and make them look almost neon and it would make people really angry at least with the Galaxy S4 I'm seeing that Samsung is really not doing that anymore thank goodness so things can look oversaturated but it's not the terrible mess that I've seen that gave ambled such a bad reputation so companies know this about color management they know that AMOLED is very Punchy and they also know that some people don't want that they don't want colors that look like toy candy colors so they really Uplay the LCD display and say that it is just so much more natural some of them saying accurate than AMOLED so that's all great and all right but people like really Punchy colors that and a lot of people really like Samsung and these LCD displayed companies want to have something that competes so what do they do they take the calibration instead of having it be natural like it's supposed to be and like they are advertising they oversaturated it horribly to where it looks very much like AMOLED but when they do that it is not accurate anymore and it's just hilarious so that's something that I want to show you with all these displays not saying that it can't look pretty and that it can't can't deliver a very awesome experience a lot like what people like on AMOLED but how dare some companies try to say that it is accurate natural fine who's to say what natural really is but accurate that's not so good at all let's go and take a look now here before me we have the three different displays we have the LG G2 that has an IPS display we have the Galaxy S4 with a Super AMOLED display and then we have the HTC1 that has a super LCD 3 display which in any other term can be considered an IPS display you can see that all of them have excellent viewing angles and if you're comparing the colors side by side you're just like wow they look very very similar to what we can see on the Galaxy S4 so no these guys are not AMOLED but you can just see that the saturations and the vibrancy of the colors just looks so similar so to the eye people are like wow you know that's that's excellent LCD screens are getting better but like I've been mentioning it has to do with the saturations of the colors which is the overall calibration the biggest difference between the LCD displays and the AMOLED display is the type of technology behind them when looking at LCD displays the displays themselves don't emit any light there's actually a backl behind both of these LCD displays that shines through filters in the display and as you know about displays there are pixels every pixel has three sub pixels red green and blue so when the light shines through those red green and blue pixels if you combine Red Green green and blue at different intensities then you get all the different colors that you're able to see AMOLED is much different as that it has o LED which is organic LED and an LED is a light emitting diode so the screen itself emits light so it doesn't need a backlight at all the thing with the backlights is that it is the single most important part of the display because if you don't have a backlight that's allowing to have the most pure colors possible then you can end up with washed out colors but AMOLED displays don't have to deal with the backlight they don't have to deal with any filters they don't have to deal with getting the colors just right with OLED displays you already have light emitting diodes that are emitting very monochromatic colors red green and blue and the more pure those colors are the wider gamut or The Wider range of colors you can display so that is why AMOLED has such a wide gamut so LCDs are able to emulate AMOLED by having a backlight that allows the display to have a wide enough gamut such as srgb or Beyond and then the companies oversaturate at will so now we're moving on to look at some measurements that I have taken with the Colorimeter of all the displays the first one that we are looking at is of the LG G2 because LG seems to be the biggest offender here to try to get their display to look very close to AMOLED with oversaturating I just find it hilarious because LG was the direct offender who said inside of their own press release that the colors are accurate No No LG no they're not you know they're not and you decided to say that they're accurate anyway blatant lie cool so what are we looking at here and how do you interpret it like I said this is a measurement of the LG G2 this is actually a gamut measurement of the LG G2 and it's looking at the color saturations as well so there's this funny looking shape that we have here and this is actually the gamut or the range of colors that your eyes are able to see and then inside of it are two triangles you see that there is a white outlined one and there is a black outlined one the black outlined one is srgb gamut that is the color range that I've been talking about this entire time the white outline triangle is the gamut or the color range that the LG G2 is able to display you can see that it's a little bit wider than srgb particularly in green that's actually not a bad thing at all is it just means that you're going to have a wider range of greens the bad thing that we're looking at here is the massive oversaturation that LG is trying to use to make it look like the AMOLED displays so you will probably notice the inside of this triangle are a bunch of colored dots these colored dots represent the color saturations of the display so you can see that you have color saturations for red green and blue those are your primary colors and then there's the secondary colors yellow magenta and cyan now I can tell that they're blatantly over saturating because these colored dots are supposed to be evenly spaced look at green for example you actually have five colored dots per color there's one in the very center that represents 0% or there's no color there the second one is 25% the third one is 50% the fourth one is 75% and the fifth one is 100% or the highest range of green that the display is able to show so if you can see here with all the colors they're not evenly spaced at all green is horribly oversaturated so just say that you have a color that's supposed to be 50% green or showing about half the green that the display is able to show instead of it being where it's supposed to be that green is going to look like 75 % green so if you think about it a color that's supposed to have 50% green that has 75% green instead ends up looking very much too green for what it's supposed to display the same thing goes with all the other colors so LG I have to ask in what way is this accurate I know seeing this is going to make a lot of people a little bit frustrated because the LG G2 is a phone that a lot of people are very excited about at this moment people have been saying absolutely wonderful things about this display then they're going to look at what I'm saying here and just say no I haven't heard this before but you can see it right before your eyes this is actually what they're doing and I also have a measurement from the AT&T version as well the first one is from the Korean version and if I look over at the AT&T version I can see that the saturations that they're putting in place is exactly the same so yes this is intentional now let's go over and look at the Galaxy S4 as you can see here yes it has a very much wider gamut as I was telling you but look at the saturation yes the saturations are past srgb and that's what's causing it to look oversaturated but you can see here look at the greens they're actually perfectly spaced aren't they I can see that there may be oversaturating just a tad bit on the blues and reds but it's not bad at all now for our last example there are other things that can be done to displays besides super saturating that can get the display to pop so when looking at the cie diagram of the HTC1 we can see that there is defin itely something going on as well now if you notice the saturations are not as bad as what you see on the G2 they're not as extreme at all but I can see that the colored dots are not evenly spaced I can see that red is oversaturated a little bit and so is blue and then I look at something like green and yellow and it looks like they are both oversaturating and unders saturating so the next thing that I can look at is the gamma chart now how you read this is you look at it as shadows midtones and highlights now Shadows are going to be very very dark colors Shadows blacks and if you look at midtones it's going to be more along the lines of skin tones and if you look at highlights you're getting into near White or whites so with the HTC1 if you look at Shadows they are boosting gamma when you boost gamma it's going to make the image darker but it's also immediately going to make things more saturated and it's the reverse effect if you take gamma and make it lower low gamma is going to brighten an image but it's going to make the color saturations go downward and it can make things wash out if it's too extreme since they've made gamma so high in Shadows basically instead of having a gradient that's near black where you can see varying Shadow it turns everything black because they've made it too dark and then I've noticed that some things look a little bit washed out on the HTC1 and it doesn't help that they have added a feature called Dynamic contrast which is supposed to change the contrast depending on what you're looking at but I noticed it's just kind of helping the colors look more washed out particularly in midtones and highlights so you can see that there's a lot of different things things that companies do to take away from the naturalness and the accuracy of LCD screens in favor of making it look Punchy making the colors pop the general consensus is that it looks nice if it's done right at least it can be an experience but it's definitely not accurate and it's up to you whether you think it looks natural or not an inherent difficulty of AMOLED technology that I feel needs to be expressed in our little journey that we're having here into the depths of AMOLED and LCD techn ology is that LCD displays are a little bit more robust the problem that we have with light emitting diodes is that they emit Lights by themselves they're like little light bulbs and like light bulbs will end up doing eventually they start to dim or they will burn out like I said displays are made up of pixels and every pixel has three sub pixels red green and blue now you can see here that we have red green and blue so when I hit the red this is just a Diagnostics within the Samsung phone I'm only activating the red sub pixels if I go back outward hit green I'm only activating the green sub pixels then if I go under blue of course I'm only activating the blue sub pixels the thing here is that the blue sub pixels or the blue color wavelength is the most high energy of all the other ones so what ends up happening is that if you have your display on something like an image and if that image does not move just say like the status bar there's a line right here or if you have a text box or if you have a keyboard that keyboard stays there for a very long time if you're somebody who's texting a lot the blue sub pixels since they're the most high energy they start to run down the quickest so you get something that's called Blue subpixel burn in over time so if you're somebody who's texting a lot those poor little blue subpixels end up wearing down over time and on some images you end up seeing lines you can end up actually seeing ghosting or burning lines now I haven't had this phone for very long and I've used a lot of other phones in between but I've had my Galaxy Note and my poor Galaxy Note had a very obvious Burnin line whenever I looked at Blue and I could also actually make out keys on the keyboard it was actually that bad there are times where this is not so obvious and no the image does not have to be all blue in order to see the burn in but over time blue pixel burn and ends up being there and there's really not much that you can do to get rid of it especially when you have something like a status bar so if you're somebody who's texting a lot or you have static images all the time I recommend more or less going with an LCD screen because with LCD screens you're not going to get blue pixel burning so thank you everybody for watching this has been Erica the technology nerd who likes to film stuff please rate comment and subscribe I also have a website angelof tech.com if you'd like to you can go over there and check it out I have some forums if you want to ask questions it's probably the best way to have them answered I hope I've been able to help you decide which display technology that you like best I hope I've helped you get a good understanding of what's going on with these displays and why they look saturated or why One display will look different than another it all has to do with the gamut of the display or the range of colors it can produce and also the saturation of the colors in calibration if you want to know what my type of favorite display is it has to be LCD one that's properly calibrated that doesn't have all that nonsense oversaturation sorry amlet I really do like you but that blue pixel burning really breaks the deal for me have a good night everybody\n"