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It looks as if the long-awaited OLED hardware shift we finally saw happen in premium 2021 TVs was just the start of a new era of OLED picture quality innovation. Today LG Display, the company that manufactures pretty much all the OLED panels that ultimately find their way into OLED TVs, has announced new ‘OLED EX’ panels which, it claims, can deliver as much as 30% more brightness than ‘conventional OLED displays’.
It should be said right away that this statement is a little vague; last year’s new premium displays (dubbed evo panels by LG Electronic’s TV division) delivered as much as 20% more brightness than previous ‘conventional’ OLEDs. So LG Display could be saying here that the new EX technology only actually delivers 10% more brightness than those ‘evo’ displays, rather than 30% more brightness than any previous OLED TV.
LG Display's new OLED EX technology promises 30% more brightness than conventional OLED displays.
LG Display does, though, go to the trouble of explaining in more technical detail than usual how OLED EX (the name of which is apparently derived from ‘Evolution and eXperience’), works, with the main advancement centering around the use of Deuterium in the OLED EX panels’ organic light emitting diodes.
Deuterium enables such diodes to emit stronger light levels, but the material’s use in OLED displays has been hindered previously by the fact that very little Deuterium can be found in the natural world. According to LG Display, normally only one atom of Deuterium, which is around twice as heavy as Hydrogen, is found in around every 6,000 regular Hydrogen atoms.
LG Display has discovered a method, though, of not only extracting deuterium from water, but stabilising the resulting compounds so that they can be applied to OLED pixels, allowing them to output more light while maintaining high levels of efficiency over long periods of time.
LG Display claims that the results of this extra brightness are, as you would expect, more realistic HDR details and more natural colours, delivered without any hardware-level ‘distortions’.
A secondary benefit of the new deuterium-based OLED panels finds them able to fit inside slimmer frames. So when it comes to 65-inch panels, for instance, the thickness of the bezel is reduced on OLED EX displays from 6mm to 4mm, making them even easier on the eye and more futuristic looking than they were before. Narrower frames also tend to create a more immersive viewing experience, as your eye is less distracted by the physical presence of the display around the image.
AI is involved too
The extra performance of the new OLED EX displays isn’t solely down to the influence of deuterium, however. LG Display also talks in its pre-CES 2022 information about a new ‘personalized algorithm’ that uses AI machine learning techniques to better predict the usage patterns of all the diodes in the screen (even up to 8K resolutions). This enables the panel to deliver more precise control over how each diode is powered, resulting in, according to LG Display, subtler colour and detail performance.
LG Display claims that it intends to start mass producing OLED EX displays at its plants in Paju (South Korea) and Guangzhou (China) from the second quarter of 2022. That’s potentially too late for the initial new 2022 OLED TV ranges we’re expecting to launch from the likes of LG Electronics and Sony in early spring - but we’ll know more about that this week, once the major brands start exhibiting their new TV wares at CES 2022. Keep an eye on my Forbes channel for further updates.
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