Which was always so silly. No amount of screen brightness can make up for loss of detail in a dark scene and even OLED maximum brightness is enough to hurt your eyes.
Small-format OLEDs are great, but not large-format not yet.
1. Large-format OLED maximum brightness is very low. LG C2 peak SDR brightness is some 425 nits. A Samsung Neo-QLED QN90B does 1200 nits, and an iPhone 14 (small OLED) does 800 nits. In my experience, a room with windows facing the sun with thin curtains require 1000-1500 nits SDR to be comfortably legible. 2000 would be nice to have, but that's not available for the masses yet.
2. That SDR brightness is only maintained for a 10% window, and quickly drops off for larger bright areas. At 50%, it's only 350 nits. The QN90B does 850 nits sustained at 50%.
3. Same panel does peak 6-700 nit HDR, well below the 1000-4000 nits generally needed for HDR content. An iPhone 14 does 1200 nits, The QN90B does around 1700 nits. The high peak is needed to give proper "blinding" effect to e.g. skies or lights, as opposed to just looking like SDR-style bright white surfaces, especially outside a dark cinema room.
4. WOLED, which is the dominant panel technology for large high-end OLED panels, lose color saturation quickly as they approach their (already low) maximum brightness, due to relying on a white subpixel for raw luminance.
5. MiniLED backlight for LCD with 10k+ diming zones - while a stopgap - get dimming artifacts far enough down to be competitive on contrast, while destroying OLED in brightness and color saturation.
Large-panel OLED will beat LCD, but right now it is has many shortcomings. QD-OLED shows significant promise, with latest generations finally starting to see some decent brightness, but it's early (and rtings report both thermal throttling and some quite unfortunate burn-in behavior on those).
And yes, 1000 nits+ for SDR is retina-searing once the sun sets, but for those who have forgotten how sunlight feels I can report that it is quite bright and requires effort to outshine. Something like ambient light control is necessary to adjust throughout the day to not accidentally go blind.
Personally, 500 nits full screen white at 3m away is enough to hurt my eyes. I’m grateful OLEDs exceed that only for very small areas and briefly.
Also, no amount of screen brightness can make dark scenes visible in a bright room. You have to make the room darker anyway, so why bother with a brighter screen?
Because lots of people like a bright living room and want to watch Youtube without pulling the curtains?
Sure, to get the full cinema experience you should darken the room, or just watch at night. But having a bright and legible screen without having to close the curtains is still worth a lot.
Same.
Sometime I even have to dial it down if I'm watching it in dark(er) room, I also try to have lights on in room/hallway next to my living room just so my eyes don't bleed when bright scene appears
This is just plain false. Enough screen brightness works with current generation LCDs. OLED specifically is just incapable of delivering it yet. 500 nits is only bright in a darker room.
Darkening rooms in daytime for non-cinema watching is just a workaround, which is both impractical and not necessarily preferred. 1000-1500 nits is not perceived as bright in daylight, but is perfectly comfortable and legible. A little more would be nice, but not much.
(If you are light sensitive and it hurts because of that, then this is a different topic - but that is not the norm)
Glare from windows or reflected from light walls/furniture can easily exceed that, so any dark scenes (or dark editor theme) are entirely illegible. No amount of screen brightness can make blacks darker under glare, which will show up as the brightest white the screen can produce.
Darkening the environment is the only option for displaying any dark colours and it happens to make high screen brightness unnecessary.
I have bought a monitor with 600 nits so that in the summer I can work at home without drawing curtains. I can have sun in the room and still read the display without issues.
Real scene SDR brightness is all that matters for use in a bright room, as it represents the overall brightness of the screen when playing normal content. HDR brightness on the other hand is only observed in certain scenes of particular HDR content mastered to use it - not to mention that such HDR content is more likely to be consumed in a dark room to enjoy the darker details not present in SDR.
I think the limiting factor right now on those new OLED sets is thermal throttling and power limits. But all is not bad - it shows great promise of near a future where self-emissive panels have food brightness.
Peak small-window nits is not the proper Rtings metric for viewing in a bright room. It's Sustained 100%, which is only ~300 nits on the brightest, most expensive OLED panel on the market. A bright LCD panel puts out 600-800 nits here. This is the closest metric to something like watching sports in a well-lit room.
When I was choosing a new TV I was a bit concerned about brightness. 2000 nits is so much better (on paper) than 400 nits. But I wasn't planning on putting my TV outdoors and got a C2.
My current brightness settings are at 30% when watching TV at night. "Bright room" settings bumps pixel brightness to 45%, which is good enough for a room with windows on 3 out of 4 walls. It is much brighter then a 10 year old LCD it replaced. And I had no problem using that old one until I put two screens side by side.
I also know people happy with their OLEDs, but if you use your OLED at anything less than 100% brightness throughout the day, the only reasonable explanation is that your living room is much darker than mine. Which is fine, it makes it easier for you to enjoy your TV so good for you - but if someone crazy if they suggested that an iPhone never needed more than 30% screen brightness (which if the scales match would be brighter than your TV setting), I'm sure everyone would agree that they were wrong, even if it is sometimes enough.
For reference, I have my QN95A on max brightness (with auto-dim to not be killed at night), and it's not quite as bright as I want, but bright enough to be comfortable - and I don't think I'm being unreasonable. I do have windows both left and right and can look straight at the sun from my couch position twice a day (sometimes both ways due to neighboring reflections), and for WAF reasons my curtains are the thin kind.
This simply hasn’t been my experience with a 43” OLED TV, which I use as both a TV and my main monitor when working. It’s facing away from the window, which I’m sure helps, but I’ve never had to draw the curtains to see what I’m doing.
Maybe if your TV is facing a window that’s more of a problem, but if so I’d suggest not doing that. You’re never going to get a good experience from a TV facing a light source because of nothing else it will reflect off the screen.
A brighter tv is less expensive than rearchitecting your livingroom.
I don't have walls that don't face huge windows in my livingroom, so I had to splurge for a Samsung Q90. It does well for the most part. On sunny days I still miss even more brightness.
You look to have great experience in this field. What do you think about MLA OLED, and which one of these various technologies have the best chance of getting price-competitive with normal direct-lit LEDs at large screen sizes?
