this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Will there be a standard for MiniLED? (alien.top)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Will there a standard for the number of dimming zones on a MiniLED monitor? Or is it the "wild west" now and it's just going to continue to evolve faster than the industry can agree to a standard?

At first glance, I assumed that they would follow the aspect ratio of the monitor, eg there would be some multiple of 16x9 for these (144, 576, 1296, 2304). However, DisplayNinja lists 4 monitors with dimming zones between 336 and 384, 2 monitors with 500 zones, and 2 monitors with 512 zones. Then there's 21 monitors with 576 zones, which makes sense.

For 576 zones on a 27" monitor, each zone is about .5in2 or 3.2cm2. For a 32" monitor, that's .75in2 or 4.8cm2 per zone.

1152 also seems to be a popular number of zones, which is 5762, but that number does not maintain the aspect ratio, so are these zones not square? Two monitors have 1196 zones, which I'm not sure how they got that. No monitor has 1296 zones (4827). But, there are 6 with 2304 zones, which is 64*36, and does keep the 16:9 ratio. Will next year bring 3600 zone monitors? Will there be some sort of standard for each monitor size just like 24"/1080p, 27"/1440p, and 32"/4k has become a sort of standard?

It's also interesting to think about the number of pixels allocated to each zone (although there's probably overlap so to give a gradient instead of checkerboarding?).

Pixels per zone:

  • 1080p 576 zones: 3,600. 1296 zones: 1,600. 2304 zones: 900
  • 1440p 576 zones: 6,400. 1296 zones: 2,844. 2304 zones: 1,600
  • 2160p 576 zones: 14,400. 1296 zones: 6,400. 2304 zones: 3,600 They can keep cramming in more zones, but with diminishing returns. I wonder if costs will come down significantly as they go for more and more zones, so the cost of the panel won't scale with the number of zones. It has to be at OLED on cost and reliability.

Just thinking about these technical details and hoped others would like to chime in for a discussion. Thank you.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

you would have to ask VESA if they feel a standard is needed. my guess is rite now it's not a wide spread enough tech to be bothered with. the limiting factor of mini-LED is the manufacturing process and physical size of LED's. by the time Mini-LED becomes popular enough to bother the first Micro-LED monitors will begin to hit the market.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

VESA standards are trash, all of their HDR ratings are setup to be easily gamed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

If you have 3 zones of sufficient brightness you can get the hdr1400 rating. Thanks vesa

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

It'd be nice, but one problem is that "more zones" != "better image quality", at least not directly. A good example of this is Sony mini-LED TVs that might have significantly fewer dimming zones than competition, but still produce a better image, even (and sometimes especially) in darker scenes. Of course, with all else being equal, more zones will be better.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

This is why I have a 3 monitor PC. I will keep the OLED monitor as my center monitor while the other monitors are LCD monitors. Any game that forces me to letter box or window the game, due to inflexable native resolution support, gets moved to one of the cheap flaking LCD monitors. Meanwhile, I run a simple screen saver in the background on my desk top to reduce pixel burn in on the OLED monitor. OLED monitors are still very expensive high end displays. LCDs are well established and completely immune to pixel burn in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

No, backlight zones isn't any sort of thing to make a standard out of so I don't see that happening. Adding zones adds cost, and OLEDs are rapidly coming down in price so I think FALD monitors above 1152 are going to continue to be an expensive rarity. Sellers aren't going to want to make them and a year later risk having OLED prices undercut what it cost the vendors to manufacture them.

The InnoCN 32M2V has 1152 zones and is down to $600, same panel as the ASUS PG32UQX. The zones are more like postage stamps, not perfect squares.

Micro-LED sounds amazing, but I've not seen anyone say it won't require the same local dimming zone technology. If it's too costly to make every mini-LED directly controllable then it's certainly too costly to do the same with micro-LEDs I would imagine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

There is nothing to standardise. MiniLED is a type of technology used to make a dimming zone, it does not indicate the amount of zones on a FALD display.