What They Say
Rumblings have started about the sub-pixel arrangement used in the QD-OLED panel adopted by Dell/Alienware (and Samsung) in its new 34″ monitor. Heise.de found that the triangular sub-pixel layout of the display led to some colour fringing in IT applications. The pixel arrangement has red and blue sub-pixels at the bottom of a triangle and green at the top. The fringing effect is made worse by the relatively low fill factor of the display – the sub-pixels are relatively small compared to the black areas in between, especially the green sub-pixels.
The image below is from the c’t magazine test. The link is to a more detailed article in German.
What We Think
Issues about arrangements other than RGB stripes being not so good in IT applications are nothing new. There has been lots of comment, especially in Germany, on the issue of patterns such as RGBW. Although this issue has also been seen in TV panels, I really wouldn’t expect fringing to be an issue at normal TV viewing distances (although tests of video on the Dell monitor showed visible fringing) Still, it shows that Samsung Display’s early target is TV with monitors as something of an ‘afterthought’. Certainly, this issue coming to light will get reviewers scrambling to try to see this kind of fringing.
As far as I am aware, the IT OLED panels for notebooks that SDC supplies do not have this sub-pixel arrangement, but have a conventional RGB stripe.
I found a comment in a Reddit that was someone that claims to have a couple of the Alienware monitors and didn’t see it as a problem. The monitors will be launched in the UK tomorrow, 22nd March. (BR)
