We all yearn for OLED technology, but for various reasons it is delaying year after year to reach the gaming market, the main applicant for panels of this type. Instead, and in the shade, a rival is gradually emerging due to the inability of OLED to establish itself as the primary technology in the gaming world: Micro LED . This technology is gaining strength and has many of the advantages that OLED has, but without its complications, what exactly is it? Is it the future of gaming panels?
Perhaps the most important question we can ask ourselves before talking about Micro LED is at the same time the last one with which we could close this article: Can Micro LED challenge OLED not only on gaming panels, but on televisions?
Well, for this we are going to enter the field with this “new” technology that is gaining market at the expense of OLED.
Micro LED, a technology powered by Samsung and Apple
If LG and SONY push (among others) OLED, Samsung and Apple opt for the direct rival such as Micro LED, but to understand this rivalry and the characteristics of this revolutionary technology we have to understand the backlighting on current LCD screens.
Today’s monitors have one or more matrices (layers) that project light onto the pixel matrix, brightening them. As we all know, the panelists are in the eternal quest for the equality and uniformity of the panels with respect to light and therefore to brightness.
This logically influences the color as well as the brightness of the screen itself and due to this, levels are obtained that are not to the liking of the users, needless to say, of the professionals.
Micro LEDs as well as OLED solve this problem because they create their own light without the need for the rear matrices, which means very clear advantages such as less total panel thickness, better brightness and colors, deep blacks etc.
But the dispute between these two technologies currently has a winner: Micro LED. Unlike organic diodes in OLED technology, Micro LED does not depend on organic compounds that deteriorate over time and with still images, but at the same time it does not lose any of its properties.
Cheaper than OLED, but difficult to produce at large size and scale
Pixel density is going to be the key to bring Micro LED technology to the gaming world and with that we forget OLED with the successor of LED arrays.
The current problem is that the calibration of all the Micro LEDs due to how the panels are formed. The work includes robots that place each small LED next to each other, which implies that the color calibration must be perfect between all the attachments, something complicated at first. An example of a typical 4K screen includes on average 25 million of those Micro LEDs, but if they are not calibrated perfectly they will not offer a better image than OLED, for example.
One of the advantages that Micro LED will have as a technology is that many manufacturers will include a kind of individual parabolic mirror behind each LED, which will push even more brightness and color towards us, all with less power consumption than typical OLED or matrix LEDs. .
Therefore, Micro LED as technology is the most advanced so far, but it has the only downside of being very complicated to manufacture, which increases the price with fewer units available. New, more precise and advanced robots will be needed to start producing panels of different sizes en masse and thereby dethrone any other existing technology, both for TV and for gaming panels.