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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 6th, 2023

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  • Reposting my answer from a similar thread. TLDR: I took the plunge on OLED TV in 2021 as a primary monitor and it’s been incredible

    I’ve been using an LG C1 48" OLED TV as my sole monitor for my full-time job, my photography, and gaming since the start of 2021. I think it’s at around 3000 4500 hours of screen time. It averages over 10 hours of on time per weekday

    It typically stays around 40 brightness because that’s all I need, being fairly close to my face the size. All of the burn-in protection features are on (auto dimming , burn-in protection, pixel rotation) but I have Windows set to never sleep for work reasons.

    Burn in has not been a thing. Sometimes, I leave it on with a spreadsheet open or a photo being edited overnight because I’m dumb. High brightness and high contrast areas might leave a spot visible in certain greys but by then, the TV will ask me to “refresh pixels” and it’ll be gone when I next turn the TV on. The task bar has not burned in.

    Experience for work, reading, dev: 8/10

    Pros: screen real estate. One 48" monitor is roughly four 1080p 22" monitors tiled.The ergonomics are great. Text readability is very good especially in dark mode.

    cons: sharing my full screen is annoying to others because it’s so big. Video camera has to be placed a bit higher than ideal so I’m at a slightly too high angle for video conferences.

    This is categorically a better working monitor than my previous cheap dual 4k setup but text sharpness is not as good as a high end LCD with retina-like density because 1) the density and 2) the subpixel configuration on OLED is not as good for text rendering. This has never been an issue for my working life.

    Experience with photo and video editing: 10/10

    Outside of dedicated professional monitors which are extremely expensive, there is no better option for color reproduction and contrast. From what I’ve seen in the consumer sector, maybe Apple monitors are at this level but the price is 4 or 5x.

    Gaming: 10/10

    2160p120hz HDR with 3ms lag, perfect contrast and extremely good color reproduction.

    FPSs feel really good. Anything dark/horror pops A lot of real estate for RTSs Maybe flight sim would have benefited from dusk monitor setup?

    I’ve never had anything but a good gaming experience. I did have a 144hz monitor before and going to 120 IS marginally noticable for me but I don’t think it’s detrimental at the level I play (suck)

    Reviewers had mentioned that it’s good for consoles too though I never bothered

    Movies and TV: 10/10 4K HDR is better than theaters’ picture quality in a dark room. Everything I’ve thrown on it has been great.

    Final notes/recommendations This is my third LG OLED and I’ve seen the picture quality dramatically increase over the years. Burn-in used to be a real issue and grays were trashed on my first OLED after about 1000 hours.

    Unfortunately, I have to turn the TV on from the remote every time. It does automatically turn off from no signal after the computers screen sleep timer, which is a good feature. There are open source programs which get around this.

    This TV has never been connected to the Internet… I’ve learned my lesson with previous LG TVs. They spy, they get ads, they have horrendous privacy policies, and they have updates which kill performance or features… Just don’t. Get a streaming box.

    You need space for it, width and depth wise. The price is high (around 1k USD on sale) but not compared with gaming monitors and especially compared with 2 gaming monitors.

    Pixel rotation is noticeable when the entire screen shifts over a pixel two. It also will mess with you if you have reference pixels at the edge of the screen. This can be turned off.

    Burn in protection is also noticable on mostly static images. I wiggle my window if it gets in my way. This can also be turned off.




    1. Some people have mentioned it already but turning human-readable code to machine code is like turning a precise cake recipe into a cake. A decent baker can do it. Any developer can compile existing code. Going from a baked cake to a precise recipe requires a chemistry lab and a team of highly-trained scientists. Same thing for code. You’ll need a highly-experienced and specialized programmer to turn a program into legible code. Its almost always easier to just rebuild from scratch.

    However companies do other things as well.

    1. Companies sometimes purposefully compress and obfuscate their code to make it hard to unpack. This happens a lot on the web where a website might have code sent to your machine in a format which could have been legible. But before they send it to you, they run the code through a program which adds extra steps, renames things, and reorders things and removes extra spaces… all to make it hard to read.

    2. Some companies will encrypt their code or programs to varying degrees. Some will do it at the storage level, such as DRM or modern disk-based videogames. The data in these games is “locked” behind passwords and keys which can only work if the program “calls home” to Steam or Xbox or whatever and those providers let the game be opened. It’s more complicated than this but that’s the basics.

    3. A lot of companies have moved their code “into the cloud”. That means, instead of giving you a full piece of software, you only get the front-end, or the pictures and words you see on screen. The actual program lives on the company’s servers which you don’ have access to. You only get to send those servers inputs, and they return outputs back to your screen.

    4. Companies can make their code secret from internal developers by breaking programs up into smaller pieces. Say you’re a developer at Apple. You might be assigned on the specific part of the system which opens apps from the home screen and may only get access to that part of the system so if your development machine gets hacked, the hackers don’t know ALL the inner workings of iOS.

    I’m sure there are more ways but this is a start.