QLED TVs- capapble of matching a CRT's performance

[Patrickbot]

I just wanted to raise awareness of the QLED TVs that came out recently. Many of these TVs have sub 16ms input lag, 120+Hz refresh rates, hardware-based backlight strobing, excellent black level and contrast ratios.

What this means is that a modern display is finally capable of matching a CRT's performance!

-With software-based black frame insertion @ 120Hz (through emulators, for example), motion blur is eliminated for 60fps content. These TVs also have a very low frame-hold time at 60fps, so stutter using the hardware-based backlight strobing is virtually nonexistent (frame-hold stutter is a big problem on OLED).

-Black level on the QLEDs is as good or better than a CRT's

-Contrast ratio is capable of matching a CRT's

-These are all wide color-gamut displays so they should be able to display the more deeply saturated reds and greens of the NTSC standard, and they are more than capable of reproducing the limited color palettes of 8 bit and 16 bit games

-Input lag with 1080p@120Hz is low enough that even with the 4ms penalty from black frame insertion added, these TVs are still getting next-frame response (<16ms input lag) at 60fps.

-Crucially, these TVs are BRIGHT. The brightest (Vizio P Series Quantum) has a sustained SDR brightness of around 800 cd/m2. You need this brightness to compensate for black frame insertion, scanlines, and phosphor/mask effects. Standard LED-lit LCDs will struggle to get bright enough with just black frame insertion and scanlines, but QLED is able to do all of this and still maintain CRT-level brightness. Only the QLEDs are capable of this; OLED's aggressive automatic brightness limiter prevents them from maintaining this level of brightness with SDR content and applications (such as emulators).

-There are excellent options in every price range!

-The only remaining problem to be solved is the viewing angle issue, which will never be as good as the viewing angle on a display that emits light directly (CRT, Plasma, OLED). Give it 5-10 more years and this too will be solved by advances in quantum dot tech.

Here is the list of recommended TVs:

Samsung Q90/Q90R QLED
Samsung Q9FN/Q9/Q9F QLED
Samsung Q8FN/Q8/Q8F QLED
Samsung Q7FN/Q7/Q7F QLED
Samsung Q6FN/Q6/Q6F QLED
Vizio P Series Quantum

Here is a thread with more information (That's me, Nesguy):

https://forums.libretro.com/t/list-of-r ... n/22451/19

[nmalinoski]

-The only remaining problem to be solved is the viewing angle issue, which will never be as good as the viewing angle on a display that emits light directly (CRT, Plasma, OLED). Give it 5-10 more years and this too will be solved by advances in quantum dot tech.

Is it, though? Will I be able to play my light gun games on a QLED TV without modifying the hardware or games?

[bobrocks95]

Pixel response time though? I'm using a Samsung C24FG70 right now and it has pretty bad overdrive with nasty ghosting on lots of darker color transitions. It's a VA panel which I would expect those TVs are as well.

[bigbadboaz]

I'm glad you're excited about these - and have no doubt they're great on their own merits - but when it's generally agreed they can't even match OLED's performance, why single them out?

After all, "QLED" is just a marketing term designed to imply competitiveness with OLED, created by a company not actually fielding OLED in its product line.

[H6rdc0re]

I just wanted to raise awareness of the QLED TVs that came out recently. Many of these TVs have sub 16ms input lag, 120+Hz refresh rates, hardware-based backlight strobing, excellent black level and contrast ratios.

What this means is that a modern display is finally capable of matching a CRT's performance!

-With software-based black frame insertion @ 120Hz (through emulators, for example), motion blur is eliminated for 60fps content. These TVs also have a very low frame-hold time at 60fps, so stutter using the hardware-based backlight strobing is virtually nonexistent (frame-hold stutter is a big problem on OLED).

-Black level on the QLEDs is as good or better than a CRT's

-Contrast ratio is capable of matching a CRT's

-These are all wide color-gamut displays so they should be able to display the more deeply saturated reds and greens of the NTSC standard, and they are more than capable of reproducing the limited color palettes of 8 bit and 16 bit games

-Input lag with 1080p@120Hz is low enough that even with the 4ms penalty from black frame insertion added, these TVs are still getting next-frame response (<16ms input lag) at 60fps.

-Crucially, these TVs are BRIGHT. The brightest (Vizio P Series Quantum) has a sustained SDR brightness of around 800 cd/m2. You need this brightness to compensate for black frame insertion, scanlines, and phosphor/mask effects. Standard LED-lit LCDs will struggle to get bright enough with just black frame insertion and scanlines, but QLED is able to do all of this and still maintain CRT-level brightness. Only the QLEDs are capable of this; OLED's aggressive automatic brightness limiter prevents them from maintaining this level of brightness with SDR content and applications (such as emulators).

-There are excellent options in every price range!

-The only remaining problem to be solved is the viewing angle issue, which will never be as good as the viewing angle on a display that emits light directly (CRT, Plasma, OLED). Give it 5-10 more years and this too will be solved by advances in quantum dot tech.

Here is the list of recommended TVs:

Samsung Q90/Q90R QLED
Samsung Q9FN/Q9/Q9F QLED
Samsung Q8FN/Q8/Q8F QLED
Samsung Q7FN/Q7/Q7F QLED
Samsung Q6FN/Q6/Q6F QLED
Vizio P Series Quantum

Here is a thread with more information (That's me, Nesguy):

https://forums.libretro.com/t/list-of-r ... n/22451/19

I'm glad you're so excited about these but I have to throw in some facts.

QLED refers to Quantum Dot. In a nutshell it's an extra filter used on a LCD display. This is used in order to enhance and expand the color gamut toward Rec 2020 standards and negate the blue LEDs used in LED backlight LCD displays. It also increases brightness.

However it does not enhance or improve black levels, viewing angles and motion performance. LCD like OLED suffer from persistence (sample-and-hold). Strobing backlights can mask this to some extend but can't fix it completely like an impulse-type display (CRT and Plasma). In terms of motion CRT and Plasma will always be better than LCD and OLED.

Samsung QLED's being LCD technology uses a variant of the VA display type (vertical alignment) out of the three LCD panel types: VA (vertical alignment), TN (Twisted Nematic) and IPS (In-Plane Switching). In a nutshell VA has the best picture quality but bad to average viewing angles, TN has the quickest pixel response time but the worst picture quality and IPS is somewhere in the middle in terms of picture quality and pixel response time with great viewing angles. Now onto the VA panel in the Samsung QLED TV's those have a native contrast ratio of 5.000:1, in theory. With blacklight trick (local dimming) it can produce higher numbers but with drawbacks like blooming or a loss of shadow details. High-end CRT's have up to 15.000:1 native contrast ratio. LCD's go brighter but CRT's can go darker, as in better black levels.

Consoles older than the Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 didn't support anything higher than 24-bit true color (24-bit color + 8-bit alpha) and even those only supported it as it was never used. Quantum Dots, Deep Color, High-dynamic range and Wide Gamut does nothing to enhance colors on older consoles. Only show more colors on current gen consoles using HDR and Wide Gamut like PS4 (all versions) and Xbox One (S and X).

There is no input lag on an analog CRT (50/60Hz). Some of LCD and OLED display go pretty low in terms of input lag these days (12ms) but that still won't allow for old 3D technology and light guns.

Some LCD's (QLED) go brighter than OLED's in peak but not sustained with real world content unless you like your black levels nice and grey. On top of that OLED's have infinite contrast ratio because black levels are always perfect while LCD's suffer from issues caused by it's blacklight tricks. Without these tricks contrast ratios are even lower. OLED crushes LCD in SDR and HDR, period. ABL (Auto Brightness Limiter) is only an issue when you're using your OLED display wrong.

Like I've said previously problems with bad/average viewing angles are inherently locked to VA panel technology. Samsung could go for IPS panels but then contrast ratio and black levels will suffer. A better Quantum Dot filter could result in more brightness and more color accuracy out of the box without extensive CMS calibration in the factory or at home.

Moral of my reply: Enjoy your display, it's a good display. It's no professional CRT or OLED killer. All display technologies available have strengths and weaknesses just some of the ones you stated aren't the strengths of LCD.

[fernan1234]

The only thing that would have ever been the CRT killer was FED/SED, but tragically it died in the womb, or rather it was murdered by cheap LCD.

[nissling]

-These are all wide color-gamut displays so they should be able to display the more deeply saturated reds and greens of the NTSC standard, and they are more than capable of reproducing the limited color palettes of 8 bit and 16 bit games

Wider color gamut doesn't yield a better image by itself. What matters is that the color gamut matches what the displayed content is designed for. Anyone who've worked with photography knows that most colors in Adobe RGB as a standard is not really favorable over sRGB by all mean, but they do serve different purposes (with sRGB by far being the most usable).

As you're mentioning "NTSC standard" with this sort of description, I must ask if you are actually referring to NTSC 1953? If so, it's a very strange argument since NTSC 1953 have never been used at all for any kind of creative work. And AFAIK only a handful of Eizo Color Edge monitors are from factory capable of displaying the NTSC 1953 color gamut. In the US, SMPTE-C was used for color gamut until BT.709 became the norm.

SMPTE-C was baked in the BT.601 standard when digital video hit the scene and have been the standard for SD content. There are plenty of displays that can accurately reproduce both BT.601 and BT.709, perhaps most notably higher-end Panasonic models as these have the color matrixes selectable for the end user.

For a calibrator like my the QLEDs are very annoying to work with. They have extremely agressive local dimming which cannot be turned off and the light output heavily changes depending on what's displayed. Adjusting the backlight is just awful, as you get completely different measurements with the menu on screen then viewing actual content. Also the LD causes black clipping to change way too much. Adjusting the brightness with PLUGE becomes rather confusing as that specific test pattern may look alright but anything else gets messed up. This also affects the white balance from my experience.

The panels used in the Samsung displays are certainly not capable of displaying 8-bit color depth properly. This is fairly easy to see in greyscale and color ramps. Of course this issue is also present on the LG OLEDs, but Panasonic and Sony are using better dithering algorithm to fix these issues.

[bigbadboaz]

The only thing that would have ever been the CRT killer was FED/SED, but tragically it died in the womb, or rather it was murdered by cheap LCD.

Is it really sure at this point it would have been better than OLED?

[fernan1234]

The only thing that would have ever been the CRT killer was FED/SED, but tragically it died in the womb, or rather it was murdered by cheap LCD.

Is it really sure at this point it would have been better than OLED?

If it had developed for as long as LCD has, who knows. But even assuming that it wouldn't be better than OLED, it would most likely have gotten right the things that OLED can't (like motion, brightness, true RGB) and that would allow it to truly replace CRT.

[nissling]

OLED can clearly outperform CRTs in terms of light output (and for SDR I honestly can't see why anyone would want more than 120cd/m² in a dark room). And there are OLED displays with RGB panels rather than RGBW for sure. OLED by itself doesn't really do anything wrong as far as motion goes. It just shows the each frame with no flicker or pulsation like you get on a CRT or plasma. It's static so to say, and not really worse than the older alternatives. It's just different.

[fernan1234]

OLED can clearly outperform CRTs in terms of light output (and for SDR I honestly can't see why anyone would want more than 120cd/m² in a dark room). And there are OLED displays with RGB panels rather than RGBW for sure. OLED by itself doesn't really do anything wrong as far as motion goes. It just shows the each frame with no flicker or pulsation like you get on a CRT or plasma. It's static so to say, and not really worse than the older alternatives. It's just different.

Definitely they have more light output. I meant that they have automatic brightness limiters which can be pretty annoying. And I'm of course only talking about the only OLED available at the consumer level, that is the RGBW LG OLEDs. These do have pretty bad motion, when it comes to motion persistence/eye tracking-based blur/sample-and-hold blur (which is different from the motion blur that LCDs have but OLEDs do not). OLEDs also have a lot more stutter than some LCDs (and CRTs have none) due to their long frame hold of 60fps (and also 24fps) video. The pro, true RGB OLEDs also have these issues, but they also have better ways to compensate for them, supposedly. This is for me the main reason why (LG) OLEDs are still far from being a CRT killer. And in this regard QLEDs are a bit closer like OP suggests, since then have a bit better means to compensate for persistence.

[bigbadboaz]

At least these issues can seemingly be improved (and are being worked on, in at least some respects). It doesn't sound like the technology itself is the issue, rather its current implementation.

[fernan1234]

Yeah I think OLED can get there, but it's gonna take a while. That's if Micro LED doesn't come out sooner and makes it obsolete. But at least Micro LED would have a better basis for dealing with those limitations.

[lukilla]

No way I´m using a modern display with black frame insertion, PWM leds flickered so much faster than that and they were already killing my eyes

[Xyga]

Without the use of laggy interpolation or in a situation of forced strobe or BFI, that is; playing the normal way most contents, most TVs but the currently available OLED and Sony LCDs all use slow-ass PWM for dimming (120Hz, 240Hz), which is PWM artifacts factory ruining the details in motion, and on LCDs it combines with pixel ghosting. Ugh.
At least on OLEDs you get neither ghosting nor PWM artifacts, it's all clean and no need to use blur reduction unfit for retro games (neither existing feature is really fit for retrogaming yet, each demands a sacrifice, whether in amounts of lag, refresh rate/speed accuracy, brightness and flicker).
Sure you get motion persistance but between that and the mess that slow PWM+ghosting is (which in case people missed produces motion persistence too anyway) well I choose the full persistance any day, it is mandatory to have a fast af lcd panel or oled for that, but heh.

edit: to be fair with Samsung it seems they've started learning their lesson, increasing the PWM frequency to 960Hz on their latest models. fyi it's said to need to be at least 2000Hz to be unnoticeable over 60Hz content, so hopefully TV manufacturers are getting there (some monitors feature over 10,000Hz pwm so it's no sorcery)

My main monitor is a decently fast IPS, PWM-free, lagless, and on top of that takes all refreshes 50~75Hz without conversion and not a single hiccup, so that's the actual closest-to-crt a flat panel I ever experienced, in that it does things right, accurately, without fucking up something important in exchange. You can get a somewhat similar experience with variable refresh rate support from many displays these days, although that tech has its ups and downs too and no display is identical to the other.
Sure it's only an IPS so the contrast is not the greatest, there's ghosting like on all lcd's, the scaling can't be perfect, and of course there's no blur reduction though I don't miss it because...
...because I know with the status of things in flat panel tech we cannot have it all, the only thing that's better than everything else at the moment is the Sony pro OLED range with rolling scan, which is better than brute strobing/bfi but according to Fudoh still produces an amount of flicker than can bother some people.

Now, we can throw "X or Y brand marketed tech name for its sets is superior" all we want, that doesn't change a thing to reality: all panels are still too slow and processing not smart enough to provide the ideal experience for retro games really making up for the disappearance of CRT, period.
Currently we can only choose according to our preference and needs, if we want to privilege accuracy over artifices or vice-versa to make up for the lackings of flat panels, just pick your tradeoff when purchasing.
People can get in some sort of high when they're happy experiencing a new display product's good sides, without realizing something's wrong, because you can't think of every case study or there's stuff you simply ignore, evaluating flat panels gets several stages more complex when retro stuff enters the equation. I got too enthusiastic myself several times, today I'm just a realist, in that I know better what to expect and what money can buy.

[Lawfer]

"QLED TVs- capapble of matching a CRT's performance"

Nothing matches CRT, Plasma was the closest to matching CRT and LCD, LED, QLED and OLED are all slower than Plasma.

CRT CSYNC: No processing lag, best motion, best input lag.

After all, "QLED" is just a marketing term designed to imply competitiveness with OLED, created by a company not actually fielding OLED in its product line.

They actually made an OLED model that they sold a few years ago, it was very expensive (9k) though and it used RGB-LED rather than WLED.

https://www.samsung.com/uk/tvs/curved-oled-s9c/

[bigbadboaz]

Yes, they debuted right alongside LG. Since they quickly abandoned the segment, they are now left trying to convince the masses they actually have some type of cutting-edge technology.

[Cannonballs]

This thread title makes me laugh

[vol.2]

I would like to see a response to this because OP reads a bit like marketing. No offense intended, but is this excitement or marketing?

[Bahn Yuki]

[Bahn Yuki]

This thread title makes me laugh

When I first read the title I thought it was OLED they meant. Upon further reading OP I had a good laugh too. Qled are a decent lcd but it's still an lcd. Before anyone gets upset here is my review:


https://youtu.be/Q7HQJGM7ynU


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G891A using Tapatalk