Remember when OLED was just OLED?
Perfect blacks, gorgeous colors, and one
price tag that stung. Simple. Now it's W
OLED, QD OLED, penta stack this, tandem
that. And with the prices ranging from
shockingly affordable to, oh my god,
that's 2 months rent. It's more
important than ever to know what these
buzzwords mean. So today, we're breaking
it all down. What these OLED flavors
actually mean, how they work, and which
one is right for you. The OG OLED type
that dominated the high-end TV segment
in the 2010s was LG's W OLED. You could
say WOLED, but I don't. Where the W
stands for white because the pixels only
emit white light, which color filters
then separate into red, green, and blue.
There's also an extra white sub pixel
for brightness. Think of WLED like
sticking colored tape over a flashlight.
It works, but the filter absorbs light,
so you need more power to hit the same
brightness. That's where the extra white
sub pixel comes in. But like watering
down lemonade to make it last longer, it
dilutes color saturation in bright, high
dynamic range scenes. W OLED's been on
the market the longest, and it earned
that run until tandem stacks and quantum
dots showed up to challenge it. W OLED
was widely considered the best TV panel
money could buy and arguably the best
ever made. And while OLED wasn't the
first type of OLED to hit the market, it
was the first to come in large screen
sizes. Before that, RGB OLEDs like your
phone screen were already doing the
whole every pixel emits its own light
and can be turned on and off
individually for individual contrast and
inky black levels thing, just not on the
big screen in your living room. But LG's
engineers were up against a fundamental
manufacturing wall and it came down to
size.
>> The main problem they tried to solve was
the fact that you cannot deposit and
pattern OLEDs on a very large substrate.
So, you know, when you make TVs, you
make them on glasses that are like 3 m
by 3 m size, much larger than what you
use for smartphones. The fine metal mask
used to print RGB pixels on phone
substrates literally sags at TV scale,
causing blurry and uneven prints. LG's
workound was to ditch colored pixels
entirely. Big W. But there are a few
L's, too. Losing all that light to the
inefficient color filters meant low peak
brightness and shorter lifespan. and
cranking up the voltage sent to the
pixels to address the brightness issue
only exacerbated the lifespan problem.
>> OLED devices are quite limited in their
lifetime. As OLEDs move from smartphones
and smart watches to applications that
need higher lifetime like laptops and
automotives, this is a challenge that
display makers had to solve.
>> And blue is the weak link. Today's blue
pixels need more energy than red or
green to hit the same brightness. And
they don't last as long doing it. Every
OLED variant that's come out after W
OLED is essentially a different answer
to that problem. And we're going to
break down how they do it and how well
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Samsung Display went the opposite
direction to LG, skipping white
entirely. QD OLED, that's theirs, uses
blue OLED emitters as the base and
covers the red and green sub pixels with
quantum dots. tiny nano crystals that
absorb the blue photons and remit them
as vivid red or green. Cutie OLED is
essentially X-Men's mystique. The pixels
don't hide behind a color. They morph
into it. Color conversion rather than
color filtering. At the end of the day,
it's kind of a weird architecture
because the blue OLED is the most
challenging of OLEDs to make. It's the
least efficient and the least, you know,
the lifetime is the most limited. So
they took like the worst performing
emitter and had to you know convert it
into the other colors.
>> The reason they start with blue is
because blue is the highest energy
color. So you shine it into a quantum
dot and step the energy level down to
whatever color you want. In our case,
greens and reds that are ridiculously
pure. This all amounts to great color
accuracy with particularly stunning reds
and golds and higher brightness without
the shorter lifespan. And with that,
display technology was solved and they
lived happily ever after.
Just kidding. There's always a
trade-off, right? The downside is that
the conversion trick forces the sub
pixel layout from a classic sidebyside
RGB stripe into a triangle. If you've
ever gotten uncomfortably close to a QD
OLED monitor and thought your eyes were
broken, they're not. The faint color
fringing around fine text is the
triangle layout doing its thing. For
gaming monitors, QD OLED wins on color
volume, but the text fringing means you
might not want to be working on it all
day. But technology marches ever
forward. The newest innovation making
the rounds in 2026 is something called
Tandem or Pentastack OLED. The idea
behind the Tandem is that you simply
have one OLED device on top of the
other. Each level can emit at half the
brightness. In total, you get the full
brightness or double the brightness of
each layer, but the lifetime is longer.
>> Samsung's version Pentatum keeps the
QDLE approach with blue emitters plus
quantum dots, but stacks multiple blue
layers to feed the conversion. The dots
must feed. And most importantly, they
actually got the normal RGB stripe
layout to work. So, text fringing is
finally fixed. For LG's part, their
primary RGB tandem ditches the W OLED
color filters entirely, separating red,
green, and blue emitting layers. So each
color is produced directly. Two of those
layers are blue though because blue
still needs the help. So they call it a
tandem stack even though it's more than
two layers. Like you say, it's four,
even five layers today in some
architectures. So, it's a confusing
name, but at the end of the day, the
idea the more is that the more layers
you add, then you can drive the OLED
brighter and have longer lifetimes.
>> LG shipped multistack displays in the G5
last year, and the C6H is now bringing
them to 77 and 83 in sizes, the first
time the tech isn't locked behind a
flagship. But which tech should you buy?
Well, you may love the nitty-gritty
details, but here's a reality check.
when you go to a store today, I think,
and you look at these panels, the image
quality is stunning in whatever QD OLED
or W OLED you're going to buy. So,
they're pretty interchangeable these
days.
>> Ron here has been covering OLEDs for
over 20 years. So, take that as
permission to relax. Every one of these
panels is genuinely incredible. But if
you want to learn more about how OLED
stacks up with LCD, QLED, and exactly
why some pixels are better than others,
click right here. I'm not going to point
because YouTubers are just always
pointing the wrong spot with these
things.