2026's OLED monitors can nearly recreate the sublime clarity of a '90s CRT, but Windows will have to change before we can achieve true nirvana

The 2007 season finale of TV phenom Lost ended with an all-timer twist: What had seemed like the show's routine flashback storyline, filling in the events that preceded its characters ending up in island purgatory, was actually a flash forward. Protagonists Jack and Kate were somehow safe in Los Angeles after three seasons of being stuck on the mysterious island. Escaping had been the whole point of the show—or so we thought, until a broken Jack cried "We have to go back!"

This is now how I feel about, frankly, a lot of technology. Not long before that episode aired I'd gleefully dropped $1,000 on my first HD display, a 26-inch 1366x768 Samsung LCD that served as my college dorm TV and doubled as my computer monitor. For the time it was state of the art, so much thinner and sharper and better than the CRT monitor still attached to the family PC.

Twenty years later, experts who are tuned …