1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,480 Remember when OLED was just OLED? Perfect blacks, gorgeous colors, 2 00:00:04,480 --> 00:00:07,520 and one price tag that stung. Simple. 3 00:00:07,520 --> 00:00:12,520 Now is W OLED, QD OLED, Penta Stack this, tandem that, 4 00:00:12,720 --> 00:00:17,520 and with the prices ranging from shockingly affordable to, oh my God, that's two months rent, 5 00:00:17,520 --> 00:00:20,640 it's more important than ever to know what these buzzwords mean. 6 00:00:20,640 --> 00:00:24,880 So today we're breaking it all down, what these OLED flavors actually mean, how they work, 7 00:00:24,880 --> 00:00:30,760 and which one is right for you. The OG OLED type that dominated the high-end TV segment 8 00:00:30,760 --> 00:00:35,220 in the 2010s was LG's W OLED. You could say W OLED, but I don't. 9 00:00:35,220 --> 00:00:39,320 Where the W stands for white, because the pixels only emit white light, 10 00:00:39,320 --> 00:00:42,960 which color filters then separate into red, green, and blue. 11 00:00:42,960 --> 00:00:46,000 There's also an extra white sub-pixel for brightness. 12 00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:49,660 Think of W OLED like sticking colored tape over a flashlight. 13 00:00:49,660 --> 00:00:54,520 It works, but the filter absorbs light, so you need more power to hit the same brightness. 14 00:00:54,520 --> 00:00:59,880 That's where the extra white sub-pixel comes in. But like watering down lemonade to make it last longer, 15 00:00:59,880 --> 00:01:04,060 it dilutes color saturation in bright, high-dynamic range scenes. 16 00:01:04,060 --> 00:01:07,280 W OLED's been on the market the longest, and it earned that run. 17 00:01:07,280 --> 00:01:12,080 Until tandem stacks and quantum dots showed up to challenge it, W OLED was widely considered 18 00:01:12,080 --> 00:01:16,840 the best TV panel money could buy, and arguably the best ever made. 19 00:01:16,840 --> 00:01:21,640 And while W OLED wasn't the first type of OLED to hit the market, it was the first to come in 20 00:01:21,640 --> 00:01:26,200 large screen sizes. Before that, RGB OLEDs, like your phone screen, 21 00:01:26,240 --> 00:01:29,400 were already doing the whole every pixel emits its own light 22 00:01:29,400 --> 00:01:34,340 and could be turned on and off individually for individual contrast and inky black levels thing, 23 00:01:34,340 --> 00:01:38,520 just not on the big screen in your living room. But LG's engineers were up against 24 00:01:38,520 --> 00:01:43,080 a fundamental manufacturing wall, and it came down to size. 25 00:01:43,080 --> 00:01:48,680 The main problem they tried to solve was the fact that you cannot deposit and pattern OLEDs 26 00:01:48,680 --> 00:01:53,000 on a very large substrate, so you know, when you make TVs, you make them on glasses 27 00:01:53,000 --> 00:01:58,400 that are like three meters by three meters size, much larger than what you use for smartphones. 28 00:01:58,400 --> 00:02:01,480 The fine metal mask used to print RGB pixels 29 00:02:01,480 --> 00:02:05,160 on phone substrates literally sags at TV scale, 30 00:02:05,160 --> 00:02:10,520 causing blurry and uneven prints. LG's workaround was to ditch colored pixels entirely. 31 00:02:10,520 --> 00:02:13,800 Big W, but there are a few L's too. 32 00:02:13,800 --> 00:02:19,320 Losing all that light to the inefficient color filters meant low peak brightness and shorter lifespan, 33 00:02:19,320 --> 00:02:23,000 and cranking up the voltage sent to the pixels to address the brightness issue 34 00:02:23,040 --> 00:02:28,560 only exacerbated the lifespan problem. OLED devices are quite limited in their lifetime. 35 00:02:28,560 --> 00:02:31,920 As OLEDs move from smartphones and smartwatches 36 00:02:31,920 --> 00:02:35,720 to applications that need higher lifetime like laptops and automotives, 37 00:02:35,720 --> 00:02:40,280 this is a challenge that display makers had to solve. And blue is the weak link. 38 00:02:40,280 --> 00:02:44,560 Today's blue pixels need more energy than red or green to hit the same brightness, 39 00:02:44,560 --> 00:02:49,280 and they don't last as long doing it. Every OLED variant that's come out after W OLED 40 00:02:49,280 --> 00:02:52,520 is essentially a different answer to that problem. 41 00:02:52,520 --> 00:02:56,740 And we're gonna break down how they do it and how well, or not well, 42 00:02:56,740 --> 00:03:02,120 right after this message from our sponsor. Samsung display went the opposite direction to LG, 43 00:03:02,120 --> 00:03:05,720 skipping white entirely. QD OLED, that's theirs, 44 00:03:05,720 --> 00:03:12,560 uses blue OLED emitters as the base and covers the red and green subpixels with quantum dots, 45 00:03:12,560 --> 00:03:18,680 tiny nanocrystals that absorb the blue photons and re-emit them as vivid red or green. 46 00:03:18,680 --> 00:03:22,760 QD OLED is essentially X-Men's mystique. The pixels don't hide behind a color, 47 00:03:22,760 --> 00:03:26,880 they morph into it, color conversion rather than color filtering. 48 00:03:26,880 --> 00:03:32,160 At the end of the day, it's kind of a weird architecture because the blue OLED is the most challenging 49 00:03:32,160 --> 00:03:37,560 of OLEDs to make, it's the least efficient and the least, the lifetime is the most limited. 50 00:03:37,560 --> 00:03:40,680 So they took like the worst performing emitter 51 00:03:40,680 --> 00:03:43,960 and had to convert it into the other colors. 52 00:03:43,960 --> 00:03:47,640 The reason they start with blue is because blue is the highest energy color. 53 00:03:47,640 --> 00:03:53,280 So you shine it into a quantum dot and step the energy level down to whatever color you want. 54 00:03:53,280 --> 00:03:57,160 In our case, greens and reds that are ridiculously pure. 55 00:03:57,160 --> 00:04:01,640 This all amounts to great color accuracy with particularly stunning reds and golds 56 00:04:01,640 --> 00:04:05,200 and higher brightness without the shorter lifespan. 57 00:04:05,200 --> 00:04:08,640 And with that, display technology was solved 58 00:04:08,640 --> 00:04:10,560 and you lived happily ever after. 59 00:04:12,720 --> 00:04:16,960 Just kidding, there's always a trade-off, right? The downside is that the conversion trick 60 00:04:16,960 --> 00:04:22,840 forces the sub-pixel layout from a classic side-by-side RGB stripe into a triangle. 61 00:04:22,840 --> 00:04:28,000 If you've ever gotten uncomfortably close to a QD OLED monitor and thought your eyes were broken, 62 00:04:28,000 --> 00:04:31,360 they're not. The faint color fringing around fine text 63 00:04:31,360 --> 00:04:37,160 is the triangle layout doing its thing. For gaming monitors, QD OLED wins on color volume 64 00:04:37,160 --> 00:04:41,200 but the text fringing means you might not want to be working on it all day. 65 00:04:41,200 --> 00:04:46,640 But technology marches ever forward. The newest innovation making the rounds in 2026 66 00:04:46,640 --> 00:04:50,280 is something called tandem or pentastack OLED. 67 00:04:50,280 --> 00:04:54,960 The idea behind the tandem is that you simply have one OLED device on top of the other. 68 00:04:54,960 --> 00:04:58,080 Each level can emit at half the brightness. 69 00:04:58,080 --> 00:05:02,520 In total, you get the full brightness or double the brightness of each layer 70 00:05:02,520 --> 00:05:06,440 but the lifetime is longer. Samsung's version, pentatandom, 71 00:05:06,440 --> 00:05:12,240 keeps the QD OLED approach with blue emitters plus quantum dots but stacks multiple blue layers 72 00:05:12,240 --> 00:05:16,000 to feed the conversion. The dots must feed. 73 00:05:16,000 --> 00:05:20,000 And most importantly, they actually got the normal RGB stripe layout to work 74 00:05:20,000 --> 00:05:26,000 so text fringing is finally fixed. For LG's part, their primary RGB tandem 75 00:05:26,000 --> 00:05:31,520 ditches the W OLED color filters entirely, separating red, green and blue emitting layers 76 00:05:31,520 --> 00:05:35,640 so each color is produced directly. Two of those layers are blue though 77 00:05:35,640 --> 00:05:38,880 because blue still needs the help. So they call it a tandem stack 78 00:05:38,880 --> 00:05:43,080 even though it's more than two layers. Like I said, it's four, even five layers today 79 00:05:43,080 --> 00:05:48,040 in some architectures. So it's a confusing name but at the end of the day, the idea is that 80 00:05:48,040 --> 00:05:51,720 the more layers you add, then you can drive the OLED brighter 81 00:05:51,720 --> 00:05:57,200 and have longer lifetimes. LG shipped multi-stack displays in the G5 last year 82 00:05:57,200 --> 00:06:02,200 and the C6H is now bringing them to 77 and 83 inch sizes. 83 00:06:02,360 --> 00:06:05,400 The first time the tech isn't locked behind a flagship. 84 00:06:05,400 --> 00:06:09,240 But which tech should you buy? Well, you may love the nitty gritty details 85 00:06:09,240 --> 00:06:12,560 but here's a reality chip. When you go to a store today, I think 86 00:06:12,560 --> 00:06:18,680 and you look at these panels, the image quality is stunning in whatever QD OLED or W OLED you're gonna buy. 87 00:06:18,680 --> 00:06:23,800 So they're pretty interchangeable these days. Ron here's been covering OLEDs for over 20 years. 88 00:06:23,800 --> 00:06:29,000 So take that as permission to relax. Every one of these panels is genuinely incredible. 89 00:06:29,000 --> 00:06:32,680 But if you wanna learn more about how OLED stacks up with LCD, QLED 90 00:06:32,680 --> 00:06:38,000 and exactly why some pixels are better than others, click right here. 91 00:06:38,000 --> 00:06:42,040 I'm not gonna point because YouTubers are just always pointing the wrong spot with these things.