After delaying the inevitable for as long as I could, I finally bought an OLED monitor this month. The Alienware AW3423DWF QD-OLED monitor was available at a great price, so I pulled the trigger to experience what an ultrawide OLED display feels like. While games and videos looked spectacular due to the sheer quality of the QD-OLED panel, not everything was perfect. Text rendering was suddenly weird, HDR wasn't functioning like it was supposed to, and I still hadn't completed the OLED burn-in prevention checklist. Here's what I did next.

Hiding the taskbar and desktop icons

Basic, but a must on almost all OLEDs

This might seem obvious to OLED owners, but I didn't think I'd actually do it after getting my first OLED monitor. Since I assumed I'd spend most of the time working on full-screen windows or gaming, static elements like desktop icons weren't a concern at first — I was content with auto-hiding the taskbar. However, after a few days of working, I realized I didn't like working on a maximized CMS window — my habit of having multiple windows open side by side was hard to eliminate. This meant that my OLED panel always had some desktop icons in view.

Hence, I decided to hide all the icons, and pinned most of the folders to the Explorer on the taskbar. I haven't missed having desktop icons for around three weeks now, so I reckon this is a permanent solution. If it helps me delay burn-in on my first-gen QD-OLED panel, it's a minor sacrifice to make.

Changing my wallpaper game in Wallpaper Engine

A more careful selection

On my previous IPS monitor, I never cared which wallpapers adorned my screen. I had been using Wallpaper Engine for almost two years, and used a mix of static and animated wallpapers. Once I got this OLED monitor, however, I had to rethink which wallpapers I was comfortable with. Since static elements, especially bright ones, left for a long time on the screen can cause image retention over time, I decided to lean heavily toward animated wallpapers.

Another thing I did was switch to a playlist of OLED-friendly wallpapers that automatically rotated my favorites every 10 minutes. So, even if I accidentally left the screen on, with only the desktop in view, the chances of image retention were minimized.

Rendering text using MacType

The default text looks terrible

All the concerns around text fringing on QD-OLED monitors proved to be somewhat true since I could clearly make out a kind of "color bleed" around the text, mostly in native Windows folders and settings. Naturally, I turned to ClearType to try to fix the issue, but none of the styles looked any different. That's when I found something called MacType on a Reddit post, and downloaded it to give it a try. It turned out to be much better than ClearType at fixing the QD-OLED text fringing, and I now have it enabled permanently, set to auto-start with Windows.

You can also experiment with Better ClearType Tuner since it has received positive responses from many users on Reddit. Although browsers like Chrome and Brave don't reflect the changes from MacType, I feel the biggest issues with text rendering were within Windows, and that's what I've mostly fixed now.

Calibrating Windows HDR

A rite of passage

Ensuring your new OLED monitor displays HDR content perfectly (or the best it can) is paramount to the OLED experience. The default settings aren't always bad, but you can certainly get more out of your OLED monitor by tweaking a few HDR settings on Windows. Once you turn HDR on in Windows settings, the next step is to calibrate HDR using the Windows HDR Calibration app. By taking you through a series of steps to set the maximum and minimum brightness, and color saturation, it allows you to tune your display in a way that looks best to you.

Besides choosing between modes like "HDR Peak 1000" and "DisplayHDR True Black" in the monitor's OSD settings, calibrating HDR on Windows provided the biggest visible change to my HDR experience.

Enabling RTX HDR

Put your Nvidia GPU to good use

The calibrated Windows HDR settings worked great for a while, but once I noticed subpar results in a few games, I found that "Auto HDR" on Windows wasn't the best solution available. It turns out that users with Nvidia GPUs can use "RTX HDR" instead for much better results. It does result in a slight performance penalty, but I felt the results were worth it. Turning RTX HDR on was as simple as opening the Nvidia app, opening "Graphics" settings, and enabling "RTX HDR".

If you see the toggle greyed out, you might have to enable HDR in Windows first — you can simply press Win + Alt + B to do it. RTX HDR uses advanced AI algorithms that can display SDR content in HDR without common issues like raised black levels that we see with Auto HDR.

QD-OLED monitors need some tweaking to look their best

QD-OLED displays, especially older models like the one I have, need some fiddling to truly shine. Besides calibrating your monitor and using standard burn-in prevention practices, you might also need to use third-party apps to improve text rendering. Nvidia's RTX HDR feature can also help SDR games look much better compared to using Windows' Auto HDR.