Every 4k OLED I've used has been perfectly adequate for programming.

> perfectly adequate

Exactly what I want for the thing I stare at for 8 hours/day. Not great. Not good. Perfectly adequate.

That reminds me of the swearing in speech of the new VP in The West Wing.

Adequate as I can't really tell the difference but with OLED you get perfect blacks which make dark mode and white text on black background look much better.

It's a tradeoff - if you want a fast clear gaming monitor with pure blacks, you get an OLED. If you want the clearest text and are OK with middling response time, you get an IPS.

I went the opposite route because I don't like compromise in either domain and so just bought separate displays. Not an option for all obviously.

It actually helped me enforce a separation between WFH/where I relax anyway, so not the worst.

There is also VA which provides deep (though not pure) blacks, clear text and decent response time though you get some slight smearing on high contrast edges.

Personally i prefer VA to IPS by far because IPS looks washed out to me.

Whether it's a minority opinion or not, I really can't see the difference. Even when he posted highly zoomed images of VS Code ("Visual Studio Code does a wonderful job demonstrating this problem"), the only thing I noticed is that the image on the right looks slightly brighter than the image on the left.

Then as I went back to where he was describing the problem ("fringing"), I kept forgetting when I scrolled back to the images which was which (and which image was supposed to be "worse").

I'm on a 2025 Macbook, so maybe the laptop's monitor masks the issue?

I'm on a M4 Macbook, and I can see it. I'm inclined to totally accept the blog author's experience as true for them, I'd probably experience the same thing.

The image on the right was also out of focus which hides color fringing on the LCD

(Author here.)

That's an interesting point you mention about not seeing it, because prior to buying an OLED I'd read a bunch about fringing and in many articles I just... couldn't see it. I couldn't tell what was being illustrated in the images.

It wasn't until I sat in front of one for a few hours, in my room and lighting and with my apps and had funny-feeling eyes and a this-seems-off feeling that I decided to investigate. And yes, those macro photos show fringing, but it /is/ hard to understand how the subpixel pattern translates to on-screen weirdness until you've seen it for yourself.