I thought one of the most fair comparisons to help us assess just how
next-gen the ASUS PQ22U OLED monitor is, would be to take it and put it right beside
another conventional high-end ASUS display, the PQ27UQ.
And the first thing you guys will notice,
especially if you're one of those dark mode all the things types, is how much deeper and
richer the blacks are.
This shouldn't really come as a surprise though, since it's the main claim to fame of OLED.
You get much higher contrast because when the pixels are ordered to display black,
they really give you black rather than that glowy dark gray that you're used to on an LCD.
But surely then there's got to be a downside, right?
Yeah, there is. So let's talk about that.
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In a nutshell, the reason that LCDs can't display true black is that they work by
shining a backlight through a membrane of liquid crystals that twist or
untwist to let the appropriate amount of light through. But displaying black doesn't make the backlight turn off. It just makes the liquid crystals
reorganized to try and block the light. As you can see, some light always makes it through, either the crystal,
membrane, or through the cracks between the pixels.
OLED technology, by contrast,
uses no backlight.
Instead, applying electricity causes special organic phosphors to glow.
So if you want black or the absence of light, you just turn off the electricity. And the results are, I mean,
they're just incredible.
I'm a huge fan of OLED technology, and the 3840 by 2160 resolution and inky blacks on this display make it
just look so visceral.
Much like the OLED screens that high-end phone buyers have been appreciating for the last few years.
Also of note, and this is actually one of the things that I've been personally most excited about with this technology, is this displays
incredible 0.1 millisecond pixel response time. Now, this demo here will be a familiar one for display nerds, and
this is cool. Even through the camera, if you get close, you can really see the way that an
OLED display can cut down on motion blur by the extra detail that you can make out on the alien's ship and face.
Freakin' awesome. And,
speaking of getting close, you shall. At just 21 and a half inches.
This is about as small as modern monitors get, so I guess it was a smart move for ASUS to market this thing as a
portable display for creators on the go. You see, the stand here is actually only held on by magnets,
and the monitor can be easily folded and slipped into a bag, leaving you with a display that feels
like, when you're holding it, kind of like an oversized tablet.
It's only one and a half kilograms and eight and a half millimeters thick. It also comes with this magnetic screen protector
slash stand that enables multiple configurations,
including a vertical mount, but
honestly, it was a little hard to set up and too unstable to really inspire confidence.
So, if I were you, I'd probably stick with the metal stand, which does still offer about 20 degrees of tilt adjustment.
Oh, and one more thing. I'm sure many of you will appreciate the included stylish leather carry bag.
Although, for me, it mainly served as a reminder that 21 and a half inches is too small for my main workstation,
but too big for me to just slip it into my backpack. And,
actually, the portable design also affects it in other ways.
Like the ports. All we get is a single micro HDMI and two USB-C ports,
which carry both DisplayPort and power.
I'll get back to those in a bit though, because right now, I have some burn-in questions to answer about the elephant in the room.
Image retention.
Commonly called burn-in, image retention is one of the two main reasons why OLED monitors haven't already become mainstream,
with the other one being their overall shorter lifespan.
Basically,
burn-in is caused by pixels displaying the same thing for long periods of time.
So, news station logos, sports scoreboards, video game HUDs,
I mean, really anything that stays on the screen without changing or moving.
It was the bane of plasma TVs, and it's the worst nightmare of any OLED owner.
I mean, I personally go to great lengths to ensure that my OLED TV
never gets used for long gaming sessions or streaming music, for example.
The issue,
is that on a PC, there are a lot of things that always stay in the same spot, like taskbars,
buttons, and toolbars, and
there's no real way to avoid them all together.
So, how then does the PQ22U overcome these challenges? Has there been a
technological advancement that's allowed us to finally have OLED monitors without worrying about burn-in?
No.
The PQ22U actually uses
fundamentally the same countermeasures that OLED TVs have been using for years,
like shifting the whole image over by a few pixels when it detects static content, or
simply dimming the screen, which this one does with the help of a human sensor right over there.
Now, that is supposed to detect whether the monitor is actively being used by looking for someone sitting in front of it, but
honestly, I ended up turning it off completely because I guess it was registering me as a lizard person,
or something, and turning the screen off when I was in the middle of doing something
extremely annoying. With all of that said,
even if they didn't help with burn-in,
technological advancements did still play a role in bringing this monitor to market.
So the PQ22U uses an OLED panel made by a relatively new company,
Joled, a joint venture between Sony, Panasonic, and Japan Display established in 2014. And while their OLED panels use full
RGB subpixels,
like the AMOLED screens made by Samsung, Joled is using an inkjet printing
manufacturing process to make their panels 30 to 50% cheaper than those produced with the conventional evaporation method.
So then that's pretty great.
Affordability at last! And, I mean, big-screen OLED TVs are popular, handheld devices with OLED screens are popular,
why not then go after the market in the middle?
Well, this is where we get into the problems.
For one thing, 21 and a half inches is what I refer to as a tweener size.
It's too big for tablets and laptops,
but smaller than the 23 to 24 inch size that has become really entry-level for the desktop. And then for two, if
their inkjet process has contributed to making this thing a lot cheaper,
I don't even want to know how much it was gonna cost if they made it the conventional way, because ASUS is charging
4,000 for this thing.
And no, not ringgit or yen or rupees. I'm talking four thousand freedom dollars!
So to put that in perspective, at that price, I could buy a
55-inch
LGB8 4K OLED TV,
burn it into oblivion and then buy a new one.
Whew!
So okay, but like hold on a second then. I mean, lots of products are expensive.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they're a terrible value.
So let's imagine for a moment. Let's play a little game
Money's no object and then while we're at it you you love the the totable
21 and a half inch size if those things are true. Are you getting the premium performance that the price tag implies?
Okay, so
ASUS is marketing this display towards creators and they include a factory calibration report boasting of its
fantastic color accuracy
Thanks, and indeed it has great coverage of the sRGB
Adobe RGB and DCI p3 color spaces, which is great
The problem is that when it comes to actually reproducing these billions of colors
It fails and I mean like really fails like harder than the cheapest Walmart monitor that we checked out recently
But how can that be possible?
So here's what we discovered
We could get much
Improved color accuracy and act like really accurate if we measured just a small part of the screen
Rather than the entire thing we're talking Delta ease under one. That's basically perfect
the problem is that we can't get this kind of performance across the entire screen and it's because the screen just
Isn't bright enough suggesting that there's a power issue when it just isn't getting enough juice through its USB type-c port
so in sRGB mode the bright
Brightest white is under 80 nits, and they locked the brightness, so you can't even turn it up like you can in their
Best buy showroom standard mode which makes me wonder then about the HDR experience now this monitor
supports HDR 10
HLG and Dolby vision it's actually one of the world's first displays to do so it's just that it only has a peak brightness of
335 nits and a sustained brightness of 140 nits
Now that is a far cry from the brightness levels that are required for good HDR
Thing is it's an inherent characteristic of OLED technology that increased brightness
Means increased risk of burn-in so bottom line then should you buy this monitor remember?
We're playing a little game you like the portability and money is no object
Honestly the answer is still no the price would be absurd even if the product wasn't
As rough around the edges as this one is and the portability
Even though we're playing this game where you like it
Just feels like kind of a tacked-on gimmick to make up for the fact that the screen is too small
Making matters worse it doesn't even have its own internal battery like other
Cheaper portable monitors with all of that said though as a tech demo for the concept of OLED monitors in general
I'm still excited
but also
kind of getting worried about whether this is ever going to
Take off I mean the price is gonna have to drop by a factor of four or five which is possible over time
But it's really clear to me that manufacturing volume has to ramp up
significantly to make that happen and the risk then is that by the time that happens OLED could be replaced by
Emerging technologies like micro LED which if all goes according to plan is gonna have all the benefits of OLED
So those fast response times and perfect black
But with none of the drawbacks and that is the degradation that comes from using
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