Primary RGB Tandem OLED to make TVs brighter than ever

posted on Friday, 17th January 2025 by Steve May

home cinema  OLED 

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It was the surprise sensation at CES. OLED screens built around a novel RGB Tandem structure shone brighter than any OLED before them, and both LG, with the G5, and Panasonic, with the Z95B, wowed using the technology.

The era of MLA (Micro Lens Array) technology is over, and there’s a new panel king in town.

Now inventor LG Display has officially confirmed more details about the innovation, which looks to be raising the big screen bar in 2025.

This fourth-generation OLED TV panel is claimed to be 33 per cent brighter than the previous MLA generation, and we’re told, is optimised for the AI TV era, It’s the industry’s first-ever OLED display to achieve a maximum brightness as high as 4,000 nits (when measured on a 3 per cent patch), more than enough to comfortably cover the 1000 nit HDR ‘standard’ adopted by broadcasters and streamers.

It’s clear that the display industry isn’t going to wait for content creators to shift to a higher HDR presentation. Instead, the roadmap is to use AI-powered algorithms to drive HDR peaks higher and brighter than they were in the mastering suites, hence the desire for aggressive specular luminance.

Next generation AI TVs can analyse content in real time and upscale to deliver ultra bright HDR as well as 8K resolution. LG Display says it considers higher brightness to be a key picture quality factor, because it enables more vivid images that are akin to natural human vision.

The new fourth-generation OLED panel, which made its debut at CES 2025, meets the brief, and it also enabled OLED screens to perform just as effectively in bright viewing conditions, as it does in darkened home cinemas.

The big advance centers on a Primary RGB Tandem structure, a proprietary LG Display technology that uses independent stacks of RGB elements to produce light. Previously panels used a three-stack light source, with two layers of blue elements emitting relatively short energy wavelengths alongside red, green, and yellow elements in a single layer.

The Primary RGB Tandem structure applied to the fourth-generation OLED TV panel organises the light source into four stacks by adding two layers of blue elements and independent layers of red and green elements. This improves maximum brightness by increasing the amount of light produced by each layer, compared to the previous design.

As well as increasing maximum brightness, LG Display has raised the latest OLED panel generation’s colour brightness. Colour purity is enhanced by separating the red, green, and blue elements into distinct layers, resulting in a colour brightness of 2,100 nits, a 40 per cent improvement over the previous generation (which plateaued at 1,500 nits).

Energy efficiency has also been bumped, to help combat the higher expected power consumption of AI-powered TVs. By tweaking the new panel’s structure and power supply system, LG Display has reduced its temperature, and achieving around 20 per cent greater energy efficiency than the previous generation, in the case of a 65-inch panel.

LG display has also developed an anti-glare filter for the panel. In general, a display’s colour reproduction is affected by external light. When the screen reflects ambient light in a bright room, black may appear gray while reflections of nearby objects might disrupt the viewing experience.

A newly developed film offsets both light reflected from the display’s surface and light absorbed and reflected inside the panel. LG Display says his ultra-low reflection technology blocks 99 per cent of internal and external light reflections, realising perfect black, even in a midday living room setting.

The new panel with filter can also retain color gamut and accuracy; the company says there’s virtually no change in colour gamut and offers 100 per cent color accuracy at 500 lux.

Other benefits include a 45 per cent reduction in blue light, compared with the 70-80 per cent level that would typically be produced by an LCD screen, and sustainability. Eco-friendly production methods include using more than 90 per cent fewer plastic raw materials than LCDs and improving the recycling rate of end-of-life product parts to over 92.7 per cent.

Not only will the new Primary RGB Tandem technology be used for LG’s premium OLED TVs, but it’ll turn up in its Gaming OLED lineup, targeting the high-end gaming market with a diverse range of panels.

Steve May

Inside CI Editor Steve May is a freelance technology specialist who also writes for T3TechRadarHome Cinema Choice, Trusted Reviews and The Luxe Review.

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