WQHD with 360 Hz, OLED and more

Show year 2022

The big surprises were kept away from the hardware highlights. The big players AMD, Intel and Nvidia have announced what was expected and not very spectacular. As scheduled, CES is more of a laptop chip trade show, while new generations of desktops are announced in the fall or at Computex in the summer. Yes, an RTX 3090 Ti would have been the highlight, but these days you can’t generally call graphics cards that. Despite the chip crisis, the evolution of screens continues. Not only on the monitors, no, there are also interesting gaming screens under the televisions. A milestone was the CX series among LG TVs. At the smallest diagonal of 48 inches, the display was almost desktop-appropriate.

In principle, the difference between monitors and televisions by definition is only the display port connection on monitors or the TV tuner on televisions. You can also feel a hint of evolution on monitors, while on LCD screens it happens quite gradually. A color depth of 10 bits is very common in most mid-range models, although “only” with 8 bits and frame rate control (FRC). This means that the panel displays 8-bit ie 256 gradations of color natively and displays the others up to 1024 gradations with a quick change of two gradations. The quotes next to “only” are intentional, because on the one hand the difference to the actual native 10-bit is barely visible, on the other hand almost everything happens in 8-bit in practice. So the practical advantage is limited, as is the difference between 120 and 144Hz. We “only” find 120 in TVs, while 144Hz is best marketed among gaming monitors. But that will also change on the TV side.

However, the real advantages are the current versions of the connections. A current UHD monitor with 120 or 144 Hz has HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 with DSC (Display Stream Compression). UHD resolution with 144 Hz and 10-bit color depth is now possible with both connections from the competition. The first monitors with 4K/UHD and 144 Hz still had the previous HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.2 standards, which required compromises; that is, UHD and 144 Hz with color subsampling (4:2:2) or UHD, 10 bits but only 96 Hz. Fortunately, all of that is a thing of the past. HDMI 2.1 is the revolutionary new feature that is becoming mandatory not only for TVs but also for gaming monitors (with 4K/UHD) due to the new generation of consoles. The connection competes with Displayport and offers higher data throughput than the current Displayport 1.4. It will be a while before VESA with Displayport 2.0 overtakes HDMI again; also because the transfer rate for 8K and 60 Hz with uncompressed HDR is not yet required.

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