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Shopping for a monitor can be overwhelming if you’re not already familiar with the cornucopia of acronyms used to describe different display types: LCD, IPS, OLED, QD-OLED, Mini-LED, OCD, BPD, QED, BBQ. It’s … a lot. The type of screen you get can have a huge impact on the quality of your display, so we’re here to break through the noise.
There are a lot of factors that go into picking a good monitor. What resolution does it have? How large is it? Is it an ultrawide? What is its refresh rate? These are all important factors, but arguably the most important is what type of display technology the monitor uses.
Interested in learning more about displays? Check out our lists of the Best Computer Monitors and Best TVs, as well as our guides on How To Buy A TV and How To Upgrade Your Home Theater.
First, a Few Definitions
There are a lot of confusing terms that get thrown around when discussing display technology—and it doesn’t help that manufacturers often introduce new jargon to aid marketing. Before we get to the different displays you can find, there are a few terms that are helpful to define first:
Local Dimming: Traditional LCD monitors typically use an array of LED backlights behind the pixels in the display, but this can lead to an image being brighter than necessary in dark areas. Local dimming monitors aim to fix this problem by using smaller clusters of LED backlights that can be turned on or dimmed separately, so bright parts of an image can be lit up while darker parts stay dim.Viewing Angle: While monitors are generally designed to look their best when you look at them straight-on, there can be a lot of variance when you’re watching from the side. Viewing angle refers to how off-center a viewer can be while still being able to see the image clearly.Color Space/Color Gamut: Every display can only reproduce a subset of all the colors the human eye can see. This subset is referred to as a color gamut (sometimes also referred to as “color space”). The most common color space is sRGB, though you’ll often see DCI-P3, which covers more color than sRGB.Quantum Dot: The backlight in most displays is usually a white light that then passes through a filter to produce red, green, and blue wavelengths. This is a lossy process that can produce more dull colors. Quantum dot displays use blue LEDs as a backlight that strike nanocrystals (the “quantum dots”), causing them to emit red or green light. For blue colors, the backlight simply passes through directly. This setup produces richer colors than typical LCD screens.High Dynamic Range (or HDR): The single best advancement in TVs over the last decade (in my opinion) is HDR. Where older televisions could reproduce around 16.7 million colors, HDR TVs can pull off over a billion. There are several different methods of implementing HDR including HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision. You can read our guide to these terms if you want to know more, but for simplicity: Dolby Vision is the best option right now, but any HDR is better than none.
With all that in mind, we can start talking about the different types of displays you’ll see when shopping for a new monitor.
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LCD: The Baseline
Liquid crystal displays (LCD), as their name implies, use an array of liquid crystals to produce colored light. These panels require some kind of backlight to shine white light through the liquid crystal array. Then, an electric current is applied to the liquid crystals, which either block or allow red, green, or blue wavelengths of light to pass through.
The earliest LCD displays were twisted nematic (TN) panels. The crystals are arranged in a twisted, helical configuration. While twisted, they allow light to pass through, but when they’re activated, the crystals untwist and block the backlight. Combined with a color filter over subpixels, this process produces all the wavelengths necessary for color images.
The upside of this tech is that LCD panels are relatively cheap to produce, can get bright enough to be seen even in broad daylight, and aren’t very susceptible to burn-in or degrading over time. However, this sometimes comes at the expense of color accuracy, and worse viewing angles. But in recent years, there have been improvements to the LCD process.
IPS: LCD Done Better
Some more recent LCD displays use a slightly different technology called in-plane switching (or IPS). In panels like this, the liquid crystals aren’t twisted, but instead run parallel to the panel, in a horizontal orientation. Rather than allowing light through by default, these crystals block light until they’re activated, at which point the crystals rotate to allow the backlight to pass through.
The advantage of IPS panels is that they get better viewing angles than older TN configurations, and are capable of more accurately reproducing colors. It’s so effective that when reviewing laptops like the Razer Blade 14 (8/10, WIRED Recommends), we’ve been impressed with incredible picture quality, even when compared to other, more expensive display types. Not too long ago, LCD panels struggled to compete with more expensive display tech, but IPS has helped keep LCD displays in the running.
VA: Higher Contrast LCDs
Another modern variation on LCD monitors, vertical alignment (or VA) panels are similar to IPS, except that their crystals are arranged in a vertical orientation, rather than the horizontal configuration in IPS panels. The advantage of this arrangement is that more of the backlight can be blocked.
A huge part of the downside to LCD displays is that even when crystals block the backlight, there’s always going to be some amount of light that bleeds through. This is why, even when your LCD monitor is displaying a completely black image, it appears more like a dim gray. By blocking more of the backlight, VA panels can achieve greater contrast by making dark parts of the image darker, while still maintaining the brightness of lighter parts.
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This tech comes at the expense of lower response times and more shallow viewing angles, which is why it’s less common than IPS. They’re also usually a little more expensive than IPS panels, so if contrast is important to you, you might expect to pay more for it.
Mini-LED: Local Dimming on a Smaller Scale
The backlights on most LCD displays are usually lit up across the entire screen, but TVs found a way to get better contrast by introducing local dimming. The only problem is that creating an array of backlights that could be controlled independently was difficult to scale down to smaller screens.
Enter Mini-LED. Mini-LEDs are smaller than typical LED backlights (around 200 microns), which means that display manufacturers can fit a lot more into a smaller space. To the tune of thousands of local dimming zones in laptop and tablet displays. Strictly speaking, Mini-LED is a backlight technology and can be combined with several different types of LCD panels, but it will improve contrast and black levels on any panel it’s used in.
OLED: The Holy Grail of Black Levels
One of the few alternatives to liquid crystals are organic light emitting diodes (or OLED). These panels use pixels that emit their own light, avoiding the need for a backlight. Since each pixel can emit its own light, there’s no extra light bleed in dark parts of the image. The black levels on OLED panels are effectively infinite, since any pixel that isn’t activated is functionally the same as when the display is turned off.
Since there are no backlights involved, OLED panels are incredibly good at producing high-contrast images and accurately reproducing color. However, unlike LCD displays, they’re more prone to burn-in. There also aren’t many companies manufacturing these panels. In fact, the majority of OLED panels are produced by one manufacturer: LG.
This has made OLED panels more expensive than typical LCD displays, though they’ve gotten down to more reasonable prices in recent years. Still, if you want to get the best possible picture, you’re likely to run into OLED panels, and they’re likely to come at a premium versus comparable LCD screens.
Micro-LED: The Brightest, Darkest LED
Micro-LED panels are the newest type of LED displays. What sets them apart is that individual pixels have their own dedicated backlight. This makes them similar to OLED displays, in that they can achieve true black levels, since only the pixels that are needed for a picture are turned on. What sets it apart, however, is how bright it can get.
OLED panels often struggle to reach the same brightness levels as other types of displays (though there are advancements in that area as well, more on that below). Micro-LED panels, however, can reach brightness levels of several thousand nits. The contrast between effectively perfect black levels, and such high brightness, results in strikingly vivid picture quality. Since they're based on LED tech, they're also much less sensitive to burn-in than OLED.
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The only problem is that, for right now at least, Micro-LED is prohibitively expensive and limited to only the largest, most unwieldy displays. It will probably be at least a few years before the “micro” in Micro-LED is small (and cheap) enough to power a normal-sized TV in your living room without costing as much as the house it's in.
QD OLED and WOLED: Brighter OLED
Quantum dot OLEDs (or QD-OLED) are a relatively new entry into the display scene from Samsung. While OLEDs emit their own light, they still need to use filters to produce red, green, and blue wavelengths. Typical OLEDs use a white subpixel to produce that light, increasing the brightness from each pixel.
Similar to other quantum dot displays, QD-OLED uses blue OLEDs as a light source that then strikes quantum dots to generate the red and green light necessary to produce a full-color image. This approach marries the benefits of OLED (no need for a separate backlight, high-contrast images) with the advantages of quantum dots (less light lost while passing through filters, more direct control over color precision).
Recent displays that use QD-OLED are among some of the prettiest panels we’ve ever tested here at WIRED. For example, the Samsung S95C (8/10, WIRED Recommends) blew away WIRED senior editor Parker Hall, with its perfect black levels, vibrant colors, and wide viewing angles.
WOLED is a similar technology that is also aimed at making things brighter, but comes with a white OLED layer as well. This is used in high-end models from LG like the new C4 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) to achieve peak brightness well over 1000 nits.
Since QD-OLED and WOLED panels are relatively new, displays using them are likely to be on the more expensive side for now, but you’ll likely be hard-pressed to find better image quality on monitors without them.
