OLED VS 4K (UHD)...?

This is a bad question. OLED can and will be supplied in UHD. Sony demoed a 4K (UHD) OLED Tv so you can't say which one is better.

Joel Hruska, obviously doesn't understand what UHD is.

The real question should be

OLED vs. LED/LCD.

Let me address this:

OLED offers more intense and saturated color to the eye. It offers a pixel based light source as opposed to a filter in front of a light source like LCD/LED. The negatives seem to be that it does not offer a time proven stable technology ( recall first Plasma burn in issues? OLED has some known long life trouble that needs to be resolved) and the blacks in the scene are so black and glossy, that you see room reflections. Available in the near future in both 2K and 4K versions. 3D capable

LED/LCD is a time proven technology that offers good quality in color. Cost is lower and plenty of choices on the shelf to buy right now. Available now in 2K and 4K versions. 3D capable.

Other valid questions:
3D Active shutter glasses or Passive FPR screens?
Panel TV or Front Projection system?
Buy Glasses 3DTV now or wait for one of the developing glasses free technologies to become available?

I wouldn't be surprised if OLED never becomes mainstream while UHD is a near certainty to be readily available by next christmas.

If i had to choose 1, OLED. Improved color, infinite blacks. There's other advances to make besides more pixels.

But like Don Landis said, you can have both. So if i was to buy a TV now to it would have to be a 4K OLED display.

since the TV's are getting larger and larger, and the gain is only if i don't have to sit farer away!

there is IMHO only one way to go: more and finer pixel. so im am for 8K

there was one 8K and it has 33megapixel that is imho the future.

I can't be sure yet. With a Pioneer Kuro with only 3100 hours on it, I won't be upgrading for at least 3 years. I am watching the OLED technology with interest. When I do upgrade though, it will be to a projector and screen for the HT. I would buy a 40''-50" OLED TV too if the technology stabilizes in the next 3-5 years.

Several folks who saw 4K noticed that HD looks like SD next to UltraHD. OLED or 4K LED, not a choice i want to make.

Deeper blacks & better color vs. more pixels with no source material? I'll take quality over quantity every time. As others have said, OLED can go 4k but UHD will still have bad blacks.

Whats the pixel fill ratio of OLED? ... same as LCD? ... I cant stand 1080p LCD Tvs.. I notice the digital look of them straight away because of the low pixel fill ratio.
DLP and SXRD Projectors are twice the pixel fill ratio and its very noticeable. The picture is so much smoother and more natural.

You mean a 4K set looks like SD compred to a UHD set? Or do I have it backwards? I haven't seen either in person yet, but I don't understand how the higher pixel count 4K would look worse than the lesser UHD.

HD set looks like SD set compared to UHD set (native content). So a UHD LED set will look better than HD OLED set in that regard. On the other hand there are the OLED motion/colors and blacks.

OK gotcha. I didn't think there would be much of a difference between the 4K and UHD sets.

I'm honestly more excited over the OLED even if it's a 1080p, than I am the 4K. 4K seems impressive enough, but my concern is media storage for 4K content. I remember reading somewhere that the 4K movie trailer for the Amazing Spiderman movie took up 500GB, albeit it was uncompressed but 500GB for a trailer. I don't have the kind of money to buy a Terabyte harddrive for each movie I want to store. Storage devices will be a major bottleneck for 4K content if that still holds true. Not to mention how long it takes broadcasters to stream 4K or cable providers to add 4K content to OnDemand services. We're still not even getting 1080p.

I think he means the difference between 1080p HDTV's and UHD with native content was that dramatic.

Ahh, but they are now touting the MPEG H.265 codec with more efficiency than H.264. I'd say, if they shot for 10 bit, 4:2:2 UHD content (and didn't cram the hell out the video since the PQ needs to hold up on larger screens) and Dolby Atmos like audio, then you'd need the newest multi-layer Blu-ray discs. Would the studios and the BDA go for that? It's a head scratcher right now.

You'd need new players anyway with more powerful chips to handle H.265 decoding, so why not upgrade the BD disc while they're at it? Add backwards compatibility with regular Blu-ray, of course.

In reality, the U.S. internet infrastructure just isn't ready for UHD. It can't even do quality 1080p yet. There needs to be a disc medium.

Not from my view of sony's 4K TV. It looked great, but in no way does HD look like SD after seeing it. Twice.

4K is not going to magically make everything look better. What about color, gamma, blacks and other things? The sony TV had weak blacks which is why when i went home and sat in front of my kuro and watched the same Skyfall trailer, it had way more depth and weight to the picture.

OLED at 1080p will look better than a 4K set with average PQ attributes.

VinnyS- I'm not sure where we disagree. We say the same thing but with different sentences.

Sony OLED has been on the market for several years in smaller screen size and available through Sony Broadcast division. But it is not a type of monitor a consumer would be interested in. We both agree that the consumer version of the OLED is not yet available and that promises to make them available are made all the time but nothing kept.

But all this just makes the question of choice academic because the UHD LED is available and OLED, not. It took a few years before Panasionic and others claim they resolved the burn-in problem with Plasma so it is reasonable to assume if the industry works on the problems of making large screen OLED they will eventually resolve the problems. But are they working on all the problems I mentioned? When I asked the people at Sony about these they only acknowledged one of the problems and denied they saw any reflections in the Blacks. But in my videos, you can plainly see all sorts of annoying reflections. I'm sorry, but to all who worship the infinite black level of OLED, which is fine, but if I have to also look at the room reflections, then you can keep the infinite black level. I find it annoying.

Based on what I saw and what I will accept here- The OLED is still a product in development and to want that, you have to be willing to wait, same as for glasses free technology. Were getting closer than ever before but for the near future, there is no choice. It's UHD LED or wait with your 1080p TV. I'd bet the price of UHD TV's in LED will be down to competitive long before the problems of OLED are resolved.

OLED Problems-
1. Manufacture % good product
2. Retail sales price is reasonable
3. Colors aging at different rates causing color calibration problems with age.
4. Room reflections in the blacks. There is no such thing on OLED as flat black, only glossy black.
5. Competitive panel sizes
6. 4K as the defacto standard- we should not settle for OLED in 1080p when 2160p is the new direction. Only Sony is heading in this direction.

#3- We have a similar issue with UHP lamp projectors but the fix is a simple lamp change and the projector looks like new again.

I have seen it.
Color intensity of OLED 2D does not give you depth unless you use the word "depth" defined as color saturation and luminosity. OLED emits the light as a color so all color off the screen glows! LCD/LED is a white light behind a color filter which is less intense. But neither adds 3 dimensionality or the look of 3D space.

8K offers the ability to zoom in or get up close and see more detail in the picture. 8K has more detail than 4k has more detail than 2K has more detail than 1k, etc. I see no "sense of depth" here either. 8K is fascinating but I don't see it as practical since it exceeds the ability of the human eye to resolve which tops out at 4k. Its best demonstration is when you have a wide shot of a highly detailed picture, like a wide shot of a city. Then you walk up to the screen and look at a portion of it and you can see people through the windows of the buildings walking around inside. This is part of the 8K image but is beyond what you would normally see with your naked eyes. Do we need this level of detail in movie and TV production? Are we willing to pay for this level of detail? I don't need to view my movies with a microscope to be entertained. I don't want or need to view my movies at 2ft from a 110" screen with pan and scan to see the detail, My neck would get tired.

I absolutely, positively think OLED is the way to go. I've been wanting an OLED set since I saw the technology emerge to the public (before OLED televisions were even made). I've been waiting for so long that my son, who grew up hearing me talk about the tech, jokes about how I'll never get an OLED set. He might be right. At the rate that they're coming out, if they come out this year (yeah, right, we heard that before), it'll be at least 10 years before they're cheap enough for the average person to afford. By then who knows what new technology would be out?

OLED is perfect for future 4Ks/UHDs. Been using an $800.00 720P OLED 3D display daily since November/2011 (Sony HMZ-T1). The quality of the picture is significantly superior to my 1080P VT25 Plasma.

If I had to choose between a 100" 1080p OLED screen or a 100" 4K/8K/WhateverK screen using LCD/Plasma/Front Projection, I'd select the 1080p OLED. Anybody who is serious about digital photography knows that the quality of the picture is much more important than the megapixels.

Give me OLED anyday. I would buy an OLED Tv before 4K.

Well, other AVS posters felt different.

Some Engadget quotes:
''looking at HD now feels like looking at SD. It is one of those things where the improvement doesn't appear dramatic at first, but it's hard to go back''

''The bottom line, though, is that we believe an UHD TV will always look better than a Full HD TV, all other things being equal (content, device quality, etc...).''
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/11/ultra-hd-tvs-stole-the-show-at-ces-2013/
The demo TV was a Sony 4k edge lit LED, those are the worst performing flatscreens... Samsung announced a 4K full array local dimming LED at CES2013, the UN85S9, which would be a better choice as demo 4K TV imo. In your case it would be best if there was a 4K Plasma demo.

I don't select by words. I select by what the image looks like. First of all a 100" OLED doesn't exist, not available to even look at. You might as well say you would choose the Star Trek Holodeck over a 4K LED 84" TV. Anyone who is serious about digital photography knows that its the total package that makes up image quality. We don't want to sacrifice resolution for brighter color. It's an unnecessary tradeoff. We can have both with a 4K OLED.

I do a bit of photography, and that would be my main reason to get a 4KTV.... nevermind the content, I've got my own. If 4K LCD's produce as good Q as my plasma in terms of color and contrast, then I'm fine with that, I'll take resolution. On my current 60" plasma, the videos are great, but the photo slideshows could use a lot of sharpness to them.

When this becomes mainstream, I hope it will be less confusing than it already is.

A rhetorical question not to be taken seriously.

Why not ask what would you choose, 4K OLED or 2K Holographic? Obviously OLED potentially is a great display technology, better than anything present day, but it still has problems as to long life and it is very expensive at present. 4K is not a technology. At present it is an increased display resolution, that could lead to sources of the same resolution but with a much wider color space than the present as well as longer bit lengths. Obviously, OLED can be made to display such resolutions as well but the costs would be enormous and considerable time would be needed to get 4K OLED and then to make it affordable to the majority posting here.

And then we could in the spirit of furumitus responding to the author of the article who must be an expert to be taken seriously, I just would not buy anything now unless it was a 8k holographic as if anyone so answering could afford it if it were to be sold tomorrow.

The one of the bad things about the internet is that almost anyone regardless of their lack of expetrise can be published and will be taken seriously. Posting in a forum gives one no such delusions. Just harmless dribble. Please do not take anything in my post seriously despite the probability that some things I said are accurate.


Obviously OLED is potentially more desirable that merely a resolution increase. Duh. But 4K for large displays and if content is delivered from 4K or higher source material, with a much wide color space (the standard is now double the area on the diagram, and at a longer bit length, 4k could be very important. Right now, for the vast majority of the market it would have little interest while OLED is like a magician producing the most beautiful women out of a hat, nude, and she saying for the right proce you can take me home.
Edited by mark haflich - 1/26/13 at 6:44am

This thread makes no sense whatsoever. OLED and 4K aren't mutually exclusive and are two total different display aspects.

The way I see it, the issue is this.

OLED = expensive
4K = expensive

OLED + 4K = incredibly expensive

So which would you rather have if you can only have one expensive thing? Sure some people can easily afford 4K OLED. But for somebody like me, if I was given the chance of something 1080p with an incredible picture, or something 4K with a picture that was OK, I'd choose the 1080p with incredible picture.

The frustration I, and I think a lot of people have, is prices are high because manufacturers are pouring R&D money into something that doesn't matter to us right now. For example, I have a front projection system with a 100" screen. I'd much rather a company put out a $3000 1080p projector with an image several orders of magnitude better than what I have now (in terms of black level, contrast, brightness) rather than a 4K projector which puts out a picture several orders of magnitude better (in terms of black level, contrast, brightness), and costs $10,000. Same goes with a direct view TV. I don't sit near close enough for 4K to be a benefit to me. So I'd prefer a 1080p picture which looks awesome, rather than have to pay a very hefty premium to have an awesome picture, and a whole bunch of pixels I'll only be able to enjoy if I sit 4 feet or closer to the screen.