If you’re knee-deep in the tech universe, you’ve probably noticed that some companies dangle OLED in front of us like a carrot on a stick. It’s treated as a top-of-the-line feature not just for TVs, but for tablets, computers, and game consoles. For a time, Valve sold both OLED and LCD versions of the Steam Deck — and some Nintendo fans were upset when they discovered that Switch 2 is LCD-only, despite the first-gen system getting a mid-cycle OLED model.

There are undeniable advantages to OLED on mobile devices, to be sure. But with enough experience using both LCD and OLED products over the years, I can say that you shouldn’t feel too deprived with the former. It even wins in a couple of key areas, particularly if you’re among the hardcore crowd.

What’s so special about OLED?

Picture and power

OLED’s acronym is deceiving, since its LEDs don’t work the same as the ones you’d find in a conventional LCD. It relies on organic elements — hence the “O” — and more importantly, each pixel is self-illuminating. That has several ramifications, beginning with perfect contrast. Being free of backlights, OLED pixels can shut off completely to achieve true blacks, instead of merely approximating them. That in turn helps with color reproduction, and strengthens the impact of HDR formats like HDR10 and Dolby Vision. When you put LCD and OLED devices side-by-side, the gap is often immediately noticeable.

As if that weren’t enough, OLED panels are thinner, and enable improved power consumption. Whereas the LCD Steam Deck is rated for 2 to 8 hours of gameplay, for example, the OLED model jumps to 3 to 12, despite only increasing its battery from 40Whr to 50. On an iPad Pro, you can extend runtime simply by switching to Dark Mode and using black-heavy wallpapers.

Lastly, OLED is the king of response time, with pixels changing in 0.1ms or less, compared with 1 to 10ms on many LCDs. That does quite a lot to reduce ghosting and motion blur, which is handy not just for gaming, but for video and maintaining legible text.

Why LCD still holds up

The march of progress

LCD technology hasn’t remained static — it’s been continually evolving since the first commercial products emerged in the 1970s. In my own lifetime, brightness, contrast, response times, and color accuracy have all improved tremendously. So while you might notice the difference when an OLED device is sitting right next to you, you’ll be hard-pressed to tell when looking at an LCD on its own, unless perhaps the room is dim enough that blacks start to appear gray.

In fact, LCD has long reigned in the brightness arena, and is actively pulling ahead because of one word: mini-LED. The best mini-LED displays are bright enough to be clear in the midday sun, whereas OLED sometimes requires turning down your lamps. An even newer technology, RGB mini-LED, is enabling some TVs to hit a peak brightness of 10,000 nits. That’s so intense that it might legitimately be painful in a dark room.

Then there’s the issue of burn-in. The main reasons to turn LCD-based devices off are just power consumption and avoiding backlight strain. With OLED, leaving static images onscreen for hours at a time risks permanent image retention — and in the long run, all OLEDs are prone to color tinting and diminished brightness. Countermeasures like pixel shifting can only help so much. You should automatically prefer LCD and/or mini-LED for a workstation, or if you love marathon gaming sessions.

OLED is improving too, yet its days may be numbered. That’s because MicroLED offers the same perfect contrast without the threat of burn-in. The only obstacle in its way is the cost of manufacturing. Once that drops below a critical threshold, you’ll probably look at OLED the same way you consider plasma TVs today.