LG Display confirms what Panasonic told us at CES — new four-layer OLED is here
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John Higgins Published January 15, 2025 |
It seems as though Panasonic forced LG Display’s hand when it announced at CES 2025 the new panel technology at use in its new Z95B OLED TV — a new four-layer OLED panel structure that increases brightness while improving efficiency at the same time. Today, LG Display has confirmed that it has developed this new tech, while providing more details than LG Electronics did last week when we met with them.
For context, the new G5 OLED LG debuted gets brighter than last year’s model, but without the benefit of the MLA (Micro Lens Array) technology LG developed specifically to achieve the improved brightness it needed to compete with QD-OLED and micro-LED. At the time, LG was coy on the new technology that helped the G5 get demonstrably brighter than its predecessor, the G4 OLED TV (“We’ll have more to talk about at the reviewer’s workshop later this year,” they told us), but we had strong suspicions it was a new four-layer OLED panel technology.
Two days later, Panasonic unveiled its new OLED TV, touting a new four-layer OLED panel — one almost certainly provided by LG Display.
So what is this new panel structure? Instead of having a red/green/yellow emissive layer sandwiched between two blue layers, LG Display’s proprietary four-layer structure — called Primary RGB Tandem by LG Display (and Panasonic, which confirms it uses an LG panel) — has independent red, green, and (two) blue layers. This fourth-generation OLED panel delivers improved brightness (and not just better white brightness, but color brightness, too) while also having 20% better energy efficiency over previous generations.
And the amount of improved brightness is the truly impressive part. LG Display claims the new panel structure is capable of up to 4,000 nits of brightness (which is the same number we’ve heard from Samsung Display about its new QD-OLED panel). If the G5 is capable of hitting that 4,000 nit number, likely with the help of LG’s processing, the G5 OLED TV could prove to be a bit brighter than the Z95B (Panasonic stated 3,700 max brightness at the announcement).
Color brightness is said to reach 2,100 nits, a 40% improvement over last year. The four-layer structure also allows for a decrease in the typical level of blue light emitted.
To improve black-level performance, regardless of the amount of ambient light in a room, LG Display has also developed an ultra-low reflection film that “blocks 99% of internal and external light reflections.”
The G5 we saw at CES was honestly supremely impressive, and very well might be the best TV we see in 2025.
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