Remember when OLED was just OLED? Perfect blacks, gorgeous colors,
and one price tag that stung. Simple.
Now is W OLED, QD OLED, Penta Stack this, tandem that,
and with the prices ranging from shockingly affordable to, oh my God, that's two 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 W OLED, 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 W OLED 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 W 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 could 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 three meters by three meters 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 workaround 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 smartwatches
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 gonna break down how they do it and how well, or not well,
right after this message from our sponsor. 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 subpixels with quantum dots,
tiny nanocrystals that absorb the blue photons and re-emit them as vivid red or green.
QD 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, the lifetime is the most limited.
So they took like the worst performing emitter
and had to 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 you 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 side-by-side 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, pentatandom,
keeps the QD OLED 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 I said, 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 is that
the more layers you add, then you can drive the OLED brighter
and have longer lifetimes. LG shipped multi-stack displays in the G5 last year
and the C6H is now bringing them to 77 and 83 inch 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 chip. 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 gonna buy.
So they're pretty interchangeable these days. Ron here's 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 wanna 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 gonna point because YouTubers are just always pointing the wrong spot with these things.