[jedbrooke]

I wonder if the RGB strip layout has some downsides, and why such a no brainer idea hasn’t been tried before.

If I had to guess it could be something in the manufacturing process is more difficult.

[kllrnohj]

RGB strip isn't really better, it's just what cleartype happens to understand. A lot of these OLED developments came from either TV or mobile, neither of which had legacy subpixel hinting to deal with. So the subpixel layouts were optimized for both manufacturing but also human perception. Humans do not perceive all colors equally, we are much more sensitive to green than blue for example. Since OLED is emissive, it needs to balance how bright the color emitted is with how sensitive human wet wear is to it.

[kalleboo]

> A lot of these OLED developments came from either TV or mobile

I remember getting one of the early Samsung OLED PenTile displays, and despite the display having a higher resolution on-paper than the display on the LCD phone I replaced it with, the fuzzy fringey text made it far less readable in practice. There were other issues with that phone so I was happy to resell it and go back to my previous one.

[girvo]

The article shows mac, it's not just ClearType...

PenTile for example (as another commenter pointed out) was woeful with text, and made things look fuzzy.

I'm not a fan of ClearType, but even on Linux OLED text rendering just isn't as good in my experience (at normal desktop monitor DPI)

Perhaps its down to the algorithms most OSes use instead of just ClearType, but why hasn't it been solved by this point even outside Windows?

[moogly]

They've just have had issues manufacturing it, but there were several monitors from MSI, Asus and Gigabyte with Samsung's latest gen QD-OLED display announced (and reviewed) this week with RGB stripe subpixel layout, so we are there now (as soon as they are available), and this article is somewhat poorly timed.

[c0nsumer]

(Author here.)

I'd say that because the article documents my experience at this point in time, the only poor timing is when my old-ish monitor died and I went looking for a replacement. And this article documents my experience with that.

[omcnoe]

Originally OLED TVs used different sized subpixels for different colors as part of their wear management. Red wears out the fastest so it would have the largest subpixel.

[seanalltogether]

The problem with strip layouts is if you rotate the monitor (or phone) you lose all the subpixel rendering benefits. OLED pentiles work better in all rotations.

[zokier]

Peak brightness is most likely to suffer.