For me there are three key points around OLED brightness:
(1) You watch TV in a dark room. I wonder what proportion of TV users watch their TV in the dark? I imagine the proportion is much higher in members of this forum.
Personally I do not like watching a TV without either some bias lighting behind the set - I have a remote control Philips hue light strip set to a dim white on the back of my TV - or a dimmable Hue lamp in the corner of the room.
For people, who watch TV in a brighter environment those extra nits can be very useful.
(2) The use of black frame insertion (BFI) for better motion. For me BFI is much better than motion compensation frame interpolation - which always adds some artefacts.
This years LG OLED models will be the first to use BFI. However, to use BFI successfully a display has to have a very high peak brightness - as use of BFI significantly dims the screen.
For example, my Sony ZD9 has a peak brightness between 1500 and 2000 nits. However, if I turn BFI up to 2 out of 5 then I need to set the brightness to max to compensate for the dimming effect of BFI.
As an aside if I turn BFI up to maximum the display becomes dim and flickery - however this is the only level of BFI that results in "perfect" motion. For example, if you look at a motion test such as the following you see what is actually being displayed in each frame even when watching the moving UFO - i.e. white bars with black gaps that move across the screen - and not sample and hold induced motion blur - which makes you see black boxes moving against a grey background.
Animation on Blur Busters UFO Motion Tests for testing displays and monitors.
www.testufo.com
What you should see is this - even when watching the moving UFO. If you do not then that is because your display is blurring the image (well actually your eyes are the display is not blurred) due to sample and hold motion blurring.
View attachment 1255401
So to get perfect motion with BFI we need displays with a peak brightness much higher than 2,000 nits (when measured without BFI - which is the normal case) - because the BFI results in such a reduction in peak brightness.
This may be why 2019 LG OLED sets were apparently capable of BFI but it was LG pulled the feature before release. It will be interesting to see if the 2020 sets have BFI that can be effective without making the display so dim that it becomes unwatchable - except perhaps in a completely black room.
(3) OLED brightness is significantly impacted by ABL. We keep talking about OLED peak brightness as if it is constantly around 800 nits. However, all OLEDs significantly reduce their brightness as the average brightness level of a scene increases. For example, a small white area can be very bright but if the whole screen is white e.g. a snowscene, then the whole screen will dim significantly. This is shown in the table below. For a small area of white the Samsung is "only" 34% brighter than the OLED but for a complete white screen the Samsung is almost 4 times as bright as the LG!
% screen covered
by white window | LG C9 (nits) | Samsung Q90R (nits) | How much brighter is Q90R? |
2 | 855 | 1145 | 33.92% |
10 | 845 | 1487 | 75.98% |
25 | 530 | 1275 | 140.57% |
50 | 301 | 816 | 171.10% |
100 | 145 | 536 | 269.66% |