The new year is almost upon us, and in the TV industry that means a lot of excitement and anticipation is building up about what we can expect to see at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January.
It’s at CES that the likes of LG and Samsung typically announce major advances in TV technology, and this year we can expect to see some significant improvements in the efficiency and brightness of OLED displays – both for LG Display’s WOLED and Samsung Display’s QD-OLED tech.
According to a report by FlatPanels HD, there are a lot of reasons to believe that LG Display is looking to introduce a new “4-layer OLED TV panel” that will be much brighter and more power-efficient than previous generations of the display. There are also somewhat fewer reasons to believe that Samsung Display is also hoping to boost the brightness of its QD-OLED TV displays.
We’ve already seen significant evidence that LG’s upcoming G5 OLED TV will support 165Hz refresh rates, and FlatPanels HD believes it’s likely there will be many more improvements.
It says that LG Display first revealed it’s working on a 4-layer OLED panel in January 2024, up from three layers currently, and there have been further developments since. At the 2024 Display 360 Summit in October, Ross Young, the CEO of display industry market research firm DSCC revealed to attendees that LG Display has been working all year to develop its 4-stack WOLED panel. He said that the tech may enable it to eliminate its Micro Lens Array technology, which has been responsible for WOLED’s improved performance, but comes at a significant cost due to the high prices of the materials used in its manufacture.
According to Flatpanels HD, Young said the 4-layer WOLED panels are expected to arrive in 2025 and deliver a peak brightness of around 3,700 nits
The company actually showed off a prototype of the tech during the IMID conference in South Korea in August, when it told those attending that it will improve brightness by around 25%, while extending the lifetime of the panel and reducing energy consumption.
“The existing WOLED panel stacks light-emitting layers in three layers (3-stack), but the newly introduced technology stacks one more layer and improves light-emitting elements and blue light-emitting materials," a spokesperson for the company said during the event, as per ETNews.
It wasn’t made clear if the new, 4-layer WOLED technology uses MLA or Universal Display Corporation’s newly developed blue PHOLED technology, which is a more efficient material for creating phosphorescent blue OLED pixels.
We don’t know much more than this, but Flatpanels HD points out that the energy consumption figures for LG Electronics’ 2025 TV product listings, which were found in a publicly available Hong Kong government database, do support the idea of an improved OLED panel.
Reportedly, the LG G5 OLED TV’s power consumption is rated at 164-watts for the 65-inch model and 132-watts for the 55-inch version. Those numbers are significantly lower than the 209-watts and 161-watts drawn by the LG G4 TVs that debuted this year. They suggest power consumption has been decreased by 21%, which can only mean a more efficient WOLED panel.
As for what Samsung Display has been doing, there’s a lot less to go on, but DSCC’s Young did provide a few insights during the Display 360 Summit, revealing that he expects the 2025 QD-OLED panels to reach a new peak brightness of 4,000 nits, thanks to the removal of the Quantum Dot film layer.
AV Caesar says that by printing the nanocrystals directly onto the encapsulation layer, Samsung Display’s latest QD-OLED tech would only require a single substrate and this would lead to much greater efficiency.
Young said that by eliminating the separate CF/QD substrate, Samsung Display hoped to increase peak brightness from 3,600 nits to 4,000 nits, and that it was targeting a 2025 launch date for this improved tech.
