Recent consumer OLED monitors can be suitable for vision science

TL;DR

This study evaluates four display systems, including consumer OLED monitors, to determine their suitability for vision science experiments, highlighting that some consumer OLEDs meet critical experimental requirements.

Contribution

The paper provides comprehensive performance metrics of consumer OLED monitors and demonstrates their potential for use in vision science research, expanding options beyond professional displays.

Findings

Consumer OLED monitors can meet key vision science requirements.

The Asus OLED gaming monitor shows excellent response time and luminance uniformity.

Consumer OLEDs can be suitable for certain vision experiments without high-end equipment.

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.