Tech market analyst Trendforce (via Techpowerup) is predicting a pretty eye-popping 323% growth in OLED monitor sales in 2023, taking the total units sold to over 500,000.
For 2024, Trendforce reckons the market will basically double again to over a million units. Impressive stuff, eh? Up to a point, yes. The thing is, the overall PC monitor market is expected to hit around 120 million units this year, down from roughly 135 million units in 2022 and over 140 million in 2021.
So, while OLED monitors are bucking the current trend, which is seeing a slump in sales of all kinds of PC components, let’s stay real. Even half a million OLED monitors makes for less than 0.5% of the overall market.
That perhaps isn’t surprising when you consider the typical pricing of OLED monitors is $1,000. Heck, they’re so expensive it’s made the Alienware 34-inch glossy OLED monitor look like something of a steal at $800.
Anyway, at those prices, OLED monitors are hardly likely to make up a large chunk of the market. All that said, gaming monitors as a whole are but a fraction of the overall monitor market. And we suspect the vast majority of the growth in OLED monitors is represented by the new generation of gaming OLEDs.
So, 500,000 or a million of those might be a reasonably significant chunk of the gaming monitor market as opposed to the overall monitor market. But the point remains. Until OLED monitors get a lot cheaper, they’re unlikely to be truly mass-market products.
Look carefully and you can see the CNN ticker bar and logo burned into the bottom of this image of the Alienware 34 AW3423DWF. (Image credit: Rtings)
(Image credit: Future)
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Concerns also remain over just how suitable OLED tech really is for the PC. Rtings most recent burn-in testing makes for especially uncomfortable reading, espeically when it comes to monitors with Samsung QD-OLED panels.
After four months and about 3,000 hours of 24/7 running the CNN news feed, complete with a full-width bar and logo that’s just perfect for creating burn-in, both of the Samsung-powered test monitors were showing very clear signs of permanent image retention. Ouch.
Anyway, it’s good to see that OLED is gaining some traction. But it’s still some way off being a truly mainstream display tech for PC gamers.
