This post is a landing page for all those lost souls who have purchased a fancy, brand new computer monitor only to discover that, despite so many wonderful specifications, the essential starting point for IPS LED backlight colour is an ugly, putrid yellow/green/grey which makes you sick to your stomach: impossible to read a website, utterly soul-destroying.
You may have shelled out $600.00 for the promise of gorgeous breathtaking colour. If you don’t have another, older display to compare it with, if you didn’t think to compare the colour temperature to your laptop or phone screen, if your excitement about a gaggle of marketing-exaggerated features and advertising copy had you completely neglecting to put a piece of white paper against that display you’ll be slaving with for 18 hours a day, you may not have noticed that you’ve been utterly shafted by the tech giants.
Then you’ll go on the forums, on Reddit, only to be told by “experts” that you aren’t setting your colour configuration properly, that you need expensive calibration software, and that you don’t know what colour temperature is. You’ll post your left/right comparison photos only to be told that your old display is wrong, and the new one is properly calibrated.
Listen: you are not crazy. Your colours are off. You’re being sold, hook, line and sinker on a new colour alignment which has nothing to do with correct white balance. If a few generations get used to ugly LED poverty, everyone will simply accept it as de rigeur. Cost-cutting measures, a global environmental mandate for power consumption and enforced eye care: these are all at play in the quiet gaslighting of your computing experience. Very simply: if the backlight isn’t pure white, you’ll never have a hope of colour calibration, you’ll just be pushing around various combinations of yellow, green and grey.
Someone who has not yet experienced a cruddy LED backlight won’t know what it is, won’t know why you can’t properly calibrate, and that you don’t have a pure white baseline to start from.
Do not settle for an aesthetically damaging experience. Do return these crappy products. Do write the negative reviews. Do write letters to the manufacturers and resellers. Send the message.
But more than all this – demand a civilized computing experience, as ecological and health/safety bulldozers shovel you into a hole.
I will be expanding this article. Please feel free to send me reports of your sickly green/yellow experience. We want to build a list of models to avoid, models which have a vibrant backlight with correct colour temperature, and we want to know exactly how and why this sickly reality is happening. It is urgent to stop these products from going to market before they negatively impact humankind.
You don’t want dim, grim, sickly green lights in your house, and you don’t want that experience during your screen time either.
Models To Avoid
Asus ProArt PA278CGV – I ordered (3) and they all had identical green/yellow/grey backlight grimness. Especially brutal considering the Calman-verification and printed colour calibration chart.
LG UltraGear 27GL83A – No matter how you configure it, HDR/SDR, it’s just pushing around green/yellow/grey against a yellow-green LED ceiling.
A recent comparison trip to major ‘big box’ stores has confirmed that featurewashing is currently masking poor monitor quality including many easily evident examples of non-white LEDs being implemented. Actual image quality for the money is very poor. It very much seems like non-white calibration is being sold as the norm.
Models To Embrace
MacBook Pro 2016 13.3″ – Has been a verified portable test display, Retina. Solid white point.
MacBook Pro 2019 16″ – Display seemed quite identical to the above, again Retina.
iPhone 15 – A white screen on this phone should tip you off if an IPS display has a green/yellow bias backlight.
Reasons
Here, we dissolve into complete conjecture. These are not facts, just personal musings.
It is common knowledge that cheaper LED everything is yellow/green and scudgy. We know this from crappy christmas lights. At a time when display resolution, refresh rate, latency are increasing, it’s easy to sell displays on features and quietly reduce quality. In some cases, you can see omissions and minimizing in the marketing copy. So the conjecture here is: making crappy shit, selling it as amazing, hoping no one will notice, won’t matter to most people.
It’s evident in all current monitors, that there’s huge pressure to make these displays energy-efficient. Perhaps with TÜV Rheinland and EnergyStar parameters, the manufacturers are trying to survive under pressure from environmental standards. Or, a combination of selling crappy shit, making more money, while hitting eco values. Or the sweet spot with these factors.
There’s obviously a human vision crisis related to screen time. Not just macular degeneration, but youth mental health, and so forth. The yellow baseline could be enforced eye care by global health organizations – yes, we get into the heavily conspiratorial, but apparently two companies control the production of all the panels in the world (LG, Samsung), and so it’s completely possible. Ugly crap yellow LEDs then are cheap to mass produce, currently easy to market, possibly hit environmental goals, and satisfy the enforcing of health standards. It’s important to note that yellow scudge is not at all Night Shift or BlueFilter. But it could be sold as such.
In all this sloppy conjecture, there’s only one sure thing: we are seeing grim green/yellow biased, non-pure white color temperature backlights from all the major companies. This is not “go down to Future Shop and pick up an Acer HL242 for $200 with brilliant whites”. Something wide-ranging is happening, on the order of LED light bulbs, a totally pervasive shift to non-pure backlights (at least in IPS displays). Since it’s such a huge difference, and yet no one is talking about it, is this a recent shift?
The concern with shifting standards is the proposition that a time may come where no amount of money can buy a print-proof computer display, like the incandescent light bulb.
The author does have concern for environmental matters, energy efficiency, but also human dignity, mental health and aesthetics.
Reliable colour temperature is required for his postproduction work, and in the creation of his album covers.
