WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.480 Remember when OLED was just OLED? Perfect blacks, gorgeous colors, 00:00:04.480 --> 00:00:07.520 and one price tag that stung. Simple. 00:00:07.520 --> 00:00:12.520 Now is W OLED, QD OLED, Penta Stack this, tandem that, 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, 00:00:17.520 --> 00:00:20.640 it's more important than ever to know what these buzzwords mean. 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, 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 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. 00:00:35.220 --> 00:00:39.320 Where the W stands for white, because the pixels only emit white light, 00:00:39.320 --> 00:00:42.960 which color filters then separate into red, green, and blue. 00:00:42.960 --> 00:00:46.000 There's also an extra white sub-pixel for brightness. 00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:49.660 Think of W OLED like sticking colored tape over a flashlight. 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. 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, 00:00:59.880 --> 00:01:04.060 it dilutes color saturation in bright, high-dynamic range scenes. 00:01:04.060 --> 00:01:07.280 W OLED's been on the market the longest, and it earned that run. 00:01:07.280 --> 00:01:12.080 Until tandem stacks and quantum dots showed up to challenge it, W OLED was widely considered 00:01:12.080 --> 00:01:16.840 the best TV panel money could buy, and arguably the best ever made. 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 00:01:21.640 --> 00:01:26.200 large screen sizes. Before that, RGB OLEDs, like your phone screen, 00:01:26.240 --> 00:01:29.400 were already doing the whole every pixel emits its own light 00:01:29.400 --> 00:01:34.340 and could be turned on and off individually for individual contrast and inky black levels thing, 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 00:01:38.520 --> 00:01:43.080 a fundamental manufacturing wall, and it came down to size. 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 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 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. 00:01:58.400 --> 00:02:01.480 The fine metal mask used to print RGB pixels 00:02:01.480 --> 00:02:05.160 on phone substrates literally sags at TV scale, 00:02:05.160 --> 00:02:10.520 causing blurry and uneven prints. LG's workaround was to ditch colored pixels entirely. 00:02:10.520 --> 00:02:13.800 Big W, but there are a few L's too. 00:02:13.800 --> 00:02:19.320 Losing all that light to the inefficient color filters meant low peak brightness and shorter lifespan, 00:02:19.320 --> 00:02:23.000 and cranking up the voltage sent to the pixels to address the brightness issue 00:02:23.040 --> 00:02:28.560 only exacerbated the lifespan problem. OLED devices are quite limited in their lifetime. 00:02:28.560 --> 00:02:31.920 As OLEDs move from smartphones and smartwatches 00:02:31.920 --> 00:02:35.720 to applications that need higher lifetime like laptops and automotives, 00:02:35.720 --> 00:02:40.280 this is a challenge that display makers had to solve. And blue is the weak link. 00:02:40.280 --> 00:02:44.560 Today's blue pixels need more energy than red or green to hit the same brightness, 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 00:02:49.280 --> 00:02:52.520 is essentially a different answer to that problem. 00:02:52.520 --> 00:02:56.740 And we're gonna break down how they do it and how well, or not well, 00:02:56.740 --> 00:03:02.120 right after this message from our sponsor. Samsung display went the opposite direction to LG, 00:03:02.120 --> 00:03:05.720 skipping white entirely. QD OLED, that's theirs, 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, 00:03:12.560 --> 00:03:18.680 tiny nanocrystals that absorb the blue photons and re-emit them as vivid red or green. 00:03:18.680 --> 00:03:22.760 QD OLED is essentially X-Men's mystique. The pixels don't hide behind a color, 00:03:22.760 --> 00:03:26.880 they morph into it, color conversion rather than color filtering. 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 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. 00:03:37.560 --> 00:03:40.680 So they took like the worst performing emitter 00:03:40.680 --> 00:03:43.960 and had to convert it into the other colors. 00:03:43.960 --> 00:03:47.640 The reason they start with blue is because blue is the highest energy color. 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. 00:03:53.280 --> 00:03:57.160 In our case, greens and reds that are ridiculously pure. 00:03:57.160 --> 00:04:01.640 This all amounts to great color accuracy with particularly stunning reds and golds 00:04:01.640 --> 00:04:05.200 and higher brightness without the shorter lifespan. 00:04:05.200 --> 00:04:08.640 And with that, display technology was solved 00:04:08.640 --> 00:04:10.560 and you lived happily ever after. 00:04:12.720 --> 00:04:16.960 Just kidding, there's always a trade-off, right? The downside is that the conversion trick 00:04:16.960 --> 00:04:22.840 forces the sub-pixel layout from a classic side-by-side RGB stripe into a triangle. 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, 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:31.360 they're not. The faint color fringing around fine text 00:04:31.360 --> 00:04:37.160 is the triangle layout doing its thing. For gaming monitors, QD OLED wins on color volume 00:04:37.160 --> 00:04:41.200 but the text fringing means you might not want to be working on it all day. 00:04:41.200 --> 00:04:46.640 But technology marches ever forward. The newest innovation making the rounds in 2026 00:04:46.640 --> 00:04:50.280 is something called tandem or pentastack OLED. 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. 00:04:54.960 --> 00:04:58.080 Each level can emit at half the brightness. 00:04:58.080 --> 00:05:02.520 In total, you get the full brightness or double the brightness of each layer 00:05:02.520 --> 00:05:06.440 but the lifetime is longer. Samsung's version, pentatandom, 00:05:06.440 --> 00:05:12.240 keeps the QD OLED approach with blue emitters plus quantum dots but stacks multiple blue layers 00:05:12.240 --> 00:05:16.000 to feed the conversion. The dots must feed. 00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:20.000 And most importantly, they actually got the normal RGB stripe layout to work 00:05:20.000 --> 00:05:26.000 so text fringing is finally fixed. For LG's part, their primary RGB tandem 00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:31.520 ditches the W OLED color filters entirely, separating red, green and blue emitting layers 00:05:31.520 --> 00:05:35.640 so each color is produced directly. Two of those layers are blue though 00:05:35.640 --> 00:05:38.880 because blue still needs the help. So they call it a tandem stack 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 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 00:05:48.040 --> 00:05:51.720 the more layers you add, then you can drive the OLED brighter 00:05:51.720 --> 00:05:57.200 and have longer lifetimes. LG shipped multi-stack displays in the G5 last year 00:05:57.200 --> 00:06:02.200 and the C6H is now bringing them to 77 and 83 inch sizes. 00:06:02.360 --> 00:06:05.400 The first time the tech isn't locked behind a flagship. 00:06:05.400 --> 00:06:09.240 But which tech should you buy? Well, you may love the nitty gritty details 00:06:09.240 --> 00:06:12.560 but here's a reality chip. When you go to a store today, I think 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. 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. 00:06:23.800 --> 00:06:29.000 So take that as permission to relax. Every one of these panels is genuinely incredible. 00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:32.680 But if you wanna learn more about how OLED stacks up with LCD, QLED 00:06:32.680 --> 00:06:38.000 and exactly why some pixels are better than others, click right here. 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.