Recent consumer OLED monitors can be suitable for vision science

Abstract

Vision science imposes rigorous requirements for the design and execution of psychophysical studies and experiments. These requirements ensure precise control over variables, accurate measurement of perceptual responses, and reproducibility of results, which are essential for investigating visual perception and its underlying mechanisms. Since different experiments have different requirements, not all aspects of a display system are critical for a given setting. Therefore, some display systems may be suitable for certain types of experiments but unsuitable for others. An additional challenge is that the performance of consumer systems is often highly dependent on specific monitor settings and firmware behavior. Here, we evaluate the performance of four display systems: a consumer LCD gaming monitor, a consumer OLED gaming monitor, a consumer OLED TV, and a VPixx PROPixx projector system. To allow the reader to assess the suitability of these systems for different experiments, we present a range of different metrics: luminance behavior, luminance uniformity across display surface, estimated gamma values and linearity, channel additivity, channel dependency, color gamut, pixel response time, and pixel waveform. In addition, we exhaustively report the monitor firmware settings used. Our analyses show that current consumer-level OLED display systems are promising, and adequate to fulfill the requirements of some critical vision science experiments, allowing laboratories to run their experiments even without investing in high-quality professional display systems. For example, the tested Asus OLED gaming monitor shows excellent response time, a sharp square waveform even at 240 Hz, a color gamut that covers 94% of DCI-P3 color space, and the best luminance uniformity among all four tested systems, making it a favorable option on price-to-performance ratio.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: A summary of the performance of the four tested display systems on some of the display properties we consider. The pass-fail indicators should not be interpreted as definitive criteria for the acceptance or rejection of any particular system. Rather, they serve as a means to evaluate whether a system meets its theoretical hardware specifications and operates within expected performance limits.
• Figure 2: Spectral power distribution (SPD) curves of the 4 tested displays. The colors of the curves correspond to the measured channels RGB accordingly. In addition to the black curve representing the white color SPD. a) Asus OLED, b) LG LCD, c) Samsung OLED TV, and d) PROPixx. This arrangement of sub-figures is followed throughout this paper in this order. The vertical tick spacing on the x-axis corresponds to a step of 20 nm.
• Figure 3: Luminance ramps of RGB channels plus grayscale of the 4 display systems, a) PROPixx, b) contains Asus OLED (dashed), LG LCD (dash-dot), and Samsung OLED (dotted). The curves represent the measured channels RGB with their corresponding colors, Grayscale is in black. The 3 display systems (Asus OLED, Samsung OLED TV, LG LCD) have a similar behavior and do not show any major difference in this test. The PROPixx projector is perfectly linear as expected. Pay attention to the x-axis that is not unified.
• Figure 4: Luminance ramps of RGB channels plus grayscale of the 4 display systems, a) Asus OLED, b) LG LCD, c) Samsung OLED TV, and d) PROPixx. The luminance curves show 2 different tests, solid lines represent small color patch ($512\times512$) on a full-screen mid-gray background versus dashed-lines represent full-screen color patch behaviors. Note the unequal x- and y-axes between the panels.
• Figure 5: Luminance ramps of RGB channels, when 2 channels are saturated and one is ramping up, for ASUS OLED monitor (dashed), SAMSUNG OLED TV (dotted), and LG LCD monitor (dash-dot). The colors of the curves match the channel that is varying in value.