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by kllrnohj 166 days ago
RGB strip isn't really better, it's just what cleartype happens to understand. A lot of these OLED developments came from either TV or mobile, neither of which had legacy subpixel hinting to deal with. So the subpixel layouts were optimized for both manufacturing but also human perception. Humans do not perceive all colors equally, we are much more sensitive to green than blue for example. Since OLED is emissive, it needs to balance how bright the color emitted is with how sensitive human wet wear is to it.
2 comments
kalleboo 166 days ago
> A lot of these OLED developments came from either TV or mobile

I remember getting one of the early Samsung OLED PenTile displays, and despite the display having a higher resolution on-paper than the display on the LCD phone I replaced it with, the fuzzy fringey text made it far less readable in practice. There were other issues with that phone so I was happy to resell it and go back to my previous one.

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kllrnohj 166 days ago
Pentile typical omits subpixels to achieve the resolution, so yes if you have an LCD and an AMOLED with the exact same resolution and the AMOLED is pentile, it won't be as sharp because it has literally fewer subpixels. But that's rapidly outpaced by modern pentile AMOLEDs just having a pixel density that vastly exceeds nearly any LCD anymore (at least on mobile).

There's RGB subpixel AMOLEDs as well (such as on the Nintendo Switch OLED) even though they aren't necessarily RGB strip. As in, just because it's not RGB strip doesn't mean it's pentile. There are other arrangements. Those other arrangements being for example the ones complained about on current desktop OLED monitors like the one in the article. It's not pentile causing problems since it's not pentile at all.

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girvo 166 days ago
The article shows mac, it's not just ClearType...

PenTile for example (as another commenter pointed out) was woeful with text, and made things look fuzzy.

I'm not a fan of ClearType, but even on Linux OLED text rendering just isn't as good in my experience (at normal desktop monitor DPI)

Perhaps its down to the algorithms most OSes use instead of just ClearType, but why hasn't it been solved by this point even outside Windows?

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kllrnohj 166 days ago
iPhones all use PenTile and nobody complains about fuzzy text on them. Early generations of pentile weren't that great, but modern ones look fantastic at basically everything. See also everyone considers the iPad Pro to have probably the best display available at any price point - and it's not an RGB strip, either.
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girvo 166 days ago
> and it's not an RGB strip, either.

The PPI difference matters though (and I think why my Nokia N9's PenTile OLED looked rough). Desktop displays simply aren't at the same PPI/resolution density, which is why they're moving to this new technology.

If it didn't matter, I highly doubt they'd spend the huge money to develop it.

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PunchyHamster 166 days ago
I dunno, my phone's oled (oneplus 5T) looks perfectly fine even with small fonts...
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