LG says the next generation
One of the most exciting technologies in TV land is blue phosphor OLED technology, or blue PHOLED for short. As we reported earlier this month, PHOLED is more efficient and offers much higher brightness without requiring much more power. It’s used in the red and green pixels of OLED TVs, but blue has eluded us until recently. Even now, however, it’s proving difficult to manufacture, meaning the next big thing in TV technology has taken a little longer than expected to become a commercial reality.
That means the latest news from LG Display is exciting: the company says it has created a new OLED panel based on the blue “dream OLED material,” as described by LG (via translation). As reported by ETNewsLG Display has “successfully developed an OLED panel based on blue phosphorescence.” The panel is apparently a two-stack tandem OLED and will have a similar lifespan to existing OLEDs.
That’s the good news. But the details suggest it’ll be a while before we see the technology on our screens. Previous reports have suggested that PHOLED won’t be primetime-ready until 2025, and this announcement doesn’t suggest a shorter timeframe – and suggests it could be even longer for TVs.
Why We’re Tempering Our Enthusiasm for PHOLED TVs
The key words in the LG story are “tandem OLED.” Normally, OLED displays have a single light-emitting layer; in two-stack tandem OLEDs, there are two, one on top of the other.
Apple is using tandem OLED technology in its iPad Pro (2024), and that underscores the problem with tandem OLED technology: it’s very expensive. That means it’s so far been limited to use in smaller electronics and head-up displays in cars, where longevity and resistance to screen burn-in make it worth paying extra for.
The problem is that when you want to scale that up, the complexity and cost also increase dramatically. And that means tandem OLED is in the same position as other new TV technologies when they were first developed: it’s very difficult to do at scale, and it costs an absolute fortune to do. In the short term, that means it’s going to be in relatively few devices: Samsung, for example, plans to use the technology in its phones as an upgrade from AMOLED, particularly in foldable phones, but has yet to announce plans to put it in its top-end OLED TVs.
LG is using the PHOLED material developed by Universal Display, the main company behind the technology, and using a tandem system sounds like a compromise: while Universal Display’s goal is to have blue PHOLEDs in the same panels as the green and red ones it already produces, it announced earlier this year that while “phosphorescent blue is coming [we] “It still needs some more time before it is brought to market.”
So this is good news for screens in the best phones and best tablets, but it will have less impact there anyway, because small screens can already get very bright. It’s the best TVs that will benefit most from this, so we’ll have to wait and see when the technology gets there – at this rate, it’s looking like 2026.
