Samsung Display says that the human eye perceives its OLED displays to be much brighter than an LCD display rated to the same brightness, and its claims are backed by an authoritative voice in the shape of the global safety science company UL Solutions.
In a press release this week, Samsung Display said it’s possible to quantify “perceived brightness” in displays using a metric known as “Perceptual Contrast Length”, and the results are often quite different from their measured brightness.
In fact, in the case of its OLED displays, Samsung Display said human eyes perceive them to be around 1.5-times brighter than an equivalent LCD screen.
The new PCL metric is said to take into account the contrast ratio of displays. According to Samsung Display, the superior contrast of OLED can have a big impact on how bright a display is actually perceived by humans. That’s because when a bright pixel is adjacent to one that’s “truly black”, it appears to be much brighter than one sitting next to a dark grey pixel.
OLED displays are different from LCD, because the pixels can switch themselves off to show true blacks, whereas in LCD, the pixels always remain powered on. As such, you never see proper blacks on an LCD display, but rather a very deep, dark grey colour.
According to Samsung Display, it brought in the experts from UL Solutions to verify this hypothesis, asking it to evaluate a total of 23 different OLED displays it has developed. They included 15 designed for laptops, tablets and in-car infotainment systems, and seven that were developed for televisions and computer monitors.
After extensive testing, UL Solutions said Samsung Display’s OLED panels can sometimes appear up to 2.9-times brighter than LCD in some scenarios. But on average, they offer a perceived brightness or PCL rating that’s around 1.5-times higher than that found on a similarly bright LCD display.
“Samsung Display’s 300-nit OLEDs have the same perceived brightness as 510-nit LCDs, and its 500-nit QD-OLEDs have the same perceived brightness as 767-nit LCDs,” UL Solutions said in its assessment.
In other words, Samsung’s OLED displays are generally perceived by viewers to be around 50% brighter than LCD screens with the same brightness rating. The numbers provided refer to full-screen brightness rather than peak brightness, which is substantially higher but generally measured in a much smaller window.
Samsung Display said UL Solutions' testing was done to verify the "Samsung TrueBright" distinction, which is a label it slaps onto OLED displays that meet the 1.5-times higher perceived brightness yardstick.
That said, while the numbers suggest quite a noticeable difference, it’s likely much less pronounced when comparing OLED with LCD displays that use Mini-LED backlights. The experiments performed by UL Solutions compared OLED to traditional LCD, but Mini-LED displays use local dimming to dramatically boost contrast, so they should also appear quite a bit brighter than standard LCD variants.
Samsung Display, which manufactures QD-OLED panels for televisions and monitors, and RGB OLED panels for mobile devices, said the higher perceived brightness of OLED can be especially useful for battery-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets, where power consumption is more of an issue.
“Higher brightness that increases outdoor visibility is very important,” the company said, adding that this needs to be achieved without significant battery drain.
While no mention was made of Samsung Display’s rival, it’s likely that LG Display’s WOLED panels for televisions and monitors deliver the same higher perceived brightness, as they also boast “true black” pixels.
