LG Display Unveils Fourth-Generation OLED Panel Optimized for AI Era

LG Display continues to lead the way in large-sized OLED technology by unveiling its fourth-generation OLED TV panel, which is 33% brighter than the previous generation and optimized for the AI TV era. It is the industry’s first-ever OLED display to achieve a maximum brightness as high as 4,000 nits (1 nit is the brightness produced by a candle).

Panels with both high brightness and energy efficiency are essential for AI TVs, as they use upscaling that analyzes content in real time to deliver ultra-high picture quality of up to 8K. The industry also considers higher brightness to be a key picture quality factor because it enables more vivid images that are akin to natural human vision.

LG Display’s fourth-generation OLED TV panel meets the performance demands of the most advanced AI TVs, interacting in real-time with the TV’s on-device AI to deliver the perfect picture in any environment.

The new panel’s innovation centers on a Primary RGB Tandem structure, which is LG Display’s proprietary technology that uses independent stacks of RGB elements to produce light. It had previously 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 organizes the light source into four stacks by adding two layers of blue elements and independent layers of red and green elements. It improves maximum brightness by increasing the amount of light produced by each layer compared to the previous structure.

As well as increasing maximum brightness, LG Display has raised the latest OLED panel generation’s color brightness. Color purity is enhanced by separating the red, green, and blue elements – the three primary colors of light – into distinct layers, resulting in a color brightness of 2,100 nits, a 40% improvement over the previous generation (1,500 nits).

In addition, energy efficiency has been maximized in line with the significantly higher expected power consumption of AI TVs. By enhancing the fourth-generation OLED TV panel’s structure and power supply system, LG Display has reduced its temperature and achieved around 20% greater energy efficiency than the previous generation (in the case of a 65-inch panel).

In general, a display’s color reproduction is affected by external light. As the screen reflects ambient light in a bright room, black may appear gray or overlapping reflections of nearby objects might disrupt the viewing experience.

For example, while watching content featuring a night sky in a living room in the middle of the day, any sense of immersion would be broken if the sky appears foggy or if reflected furniture overlaps on the screen.

To solve this customer inconvenience, LG Display has developed a special film that offsets both light reflected from the display’s surface and light absorbed and reflected inside the panel. With the advantage of this ultra-low reflection technology, the company’s fourth-generation OLED TV panel blocks 99% of internal and external light reflections, realizing perfect black just like in a movie theater with the lights off even in a midday living room setting (500 lux).

A display’s color gamut and accuracy also decrease dramatically as the viewing environment gets brighter. However, this TV panel sees virtually no change in color gamut and offers 100% color accuracy at 500 lux. It is therefore the only display to overcome the viewing environment limitations of conventional displays.

Meanwhile, the fourth-generation OLED TV panel provides differentiated customer value through human- friendly technologies, such as by emitting only 45% blue light compared with the 70-80% level that would typically be produced by an LCD screen. Blue light is known to negatively affect users’ vision and circadian rhythms.

It additionally stands out as a sustainable display by adopting eco-friendly methods in the entire product life cycle from development to mass production, including using more than 90% fewer plastic raw materials than LCDs and improving the recycling rate of end-of-life product parts to over 92.7%.

LG Display will apply its fourth-generation OLED TV panel to its top-of-the-line mass-produced lineup this year to consolidate its dominance in the premium TV market.

The company then plans to gradually apply its Primary RGB Tandem technology to its Gaming OLED lineup, targeting the high-end gaming market with a diverse range of panels.

“The fourth-generation OLED panel is the essence of innovation that exceeds the limits of existing displays by applying LG Display’s unique technologies such as Primary RGB Tandem and ultra-low reflection technology,” said Hyeon-woo Lee, SVP and head of the Large Display Business Unit at LG Display. He added, “We will provide an unprecedented customer experience along with superior picture quality and user-friendly technology while strengthening our OLED technology leadership.”