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

Why would you put that thing around it...

Found the person who doesn't need this monitor...

Why would you put that thing around it...

It keeps glare off the screen.

Very common for this type of professional monitor.

Quite a few misconcenptions about the various technologies so here's a quick primer:

WRGB OLED - 4 white subpixels with one going through a red filter, one going through a green filter and one goign through a blue filter. The unfiltered white pixel is there to boost the brightness. Thus you get poorer colour volume (i.e. a bright blue is actually the blue subpixel and the white subpixel). The strength of the underlying all-white subpixels is that there was no need to evaporate the red, blue and green materials separately which can lead to mask issues (this is what knackered Samsung's OLED production as they just couldn't get the yields up in 2013 to match the price drops LG achieved). The white was made from blue and yellow emitters (evo panels use blue, green and yellow).

RGB OLED (as per this screen) - the standard 3 subpixels produced by inkjet printing in this case to avoid the masking issue. It is very likely that there are still colour filters as OLED emitters tend to have quite broad spectra. As there is no white subpixel, the colour volume is good. Lifetime/burn-in is still a bit of an unknown.

QD-OLED - As WRGB OLED, all the OLED subpixels are the same colour to ease production (no mask issues) - in this case 3 blue subpixels. The red and green subpixels have quantum dot layers to downconvert the blue. QDs typically have very narrow spectra so the colours will be better / wider than regular OLED (also, no white subpixel dilution). The blue subpixel may well need a colour filter as well. The downsides are that as blue OLEDs drive all 3 colours, the efficiency of the panel is lower than RGB-OLED (this is unlikely to come to smartphones or tablets anytime soon) and the lifetime of blue is the lowest of the colours so burn-in could be an issue.

MiniLED - A regular LCD with backlighting with very small LEDs. As such there is a lack of per-pixel control (leads to blooming) but the brightness can go high and no burn-in/lifetime issues.

MicroLED - very, very small LEDs with each subpixel being an individual LED. In theory, the best of all worlds with pixel-level brightness, high brightness and no lifetime issues. Currently experiencing very low yields in manufacturing at large screen sizes (100" and over) - 'regular' sizes are goign to be even more difficult to manufacture.

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.

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.

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.

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.