LG Display solves the OLED blue light issue at long last

There’s little doubt that OLED remains the best display technology widely available when it comes to picture quality, but it seems that it just can’t meaningfully evolve anymore. After four years of minimal progress, for instance, LG Display surprised everyone by introducing MLA OLED in 2023 – which visibly improved on traditional OLED in terms of brightness and efficiency – but LG’s second-generation MLA OLED released this year did not impress in the same way, being a rather small upgrade over its predecessor.

It’s no wonder, then, that many outlets focusing on display tech pointed to an interesting ET News piece published about LG Display a few days ago: the article claims that the company succeeded in developing a new kind of OLED panel, one which uses phosphorescent material not just for the red and green color (as was already the case) but for the third, blue color as well. The latter color is currently expressed by fluorescent material, which is only able to convert around 25% of energy to light – thus demanding more power to properly work alongside red and green, reducing the overall efficiency of OLED panels in the process.

LG Display managed this by employing a “tandem” structure that stacks OLED light-emitting elements in two layers: this “hybrid” method is essentially mixing blue fluorescent and phosphorescent materials in order to combine the long lifespan of the former and the high efficiency of the latter on the same panel. Sources close to LG Display claim that this “tandem” structure is able to achieve a panel lifespan equivalent to that of existing OLEDs while consuming up to 25% less energy for the entire display. Manufacturers can, alternatively, use the same amount of energy as before in order to offer significantly brighter OLED screens.

For anyone wondering, this is not the same tech used by Apple in its excellent “Tandem OLED” screens for the latest iPad Pro models. It’s also worth noting that the ET News article does not mention whether LG Display’s new kind of OLED panel can be produced in large sizes (e.g. 65-inch or more) for OLED TVs or if it’s only initially meant for computer monitors, tablets, laptops and smartphones. What insiders reporting on this development did confirm was the LG Display will be conducting mass production performance evaluations “within the year” (so in the next few months) and that it will be reviewing commercialization of these new OLED panels immediately after.

Even if this new “dream OLED” panel can be produced in large sizes, then, it sounds like it won’t be ready to implement in 2025 OLED TV models. Manufacturers need a fair amount of time to adjust the image processing algorithms of any TV model based on display tech of different properties, after all, and development of most 2025 TV models should probably be too far along by now.

Then again, the industry thought pretty much the same thing about MLA OLED at the tail end of 2022… and LG managed to catch everyone by surprise when it announced its own TVs, based on that tech, in January 2023. One thing’s for sure: when the first of these new hybrid OLED panels do become production-ready, they’ll be initially reserved for flagship OLED TV models coming with hefty price tags. But we knew that already, no?