Is OLED Tech on the Way Out of Our TVs?
Speak to someone who was alive in the 1950s and 1960s and they will soon bore you with information about how massive the televisions were that they used to watch.
Even kids of the 1990s can remember large TVs being sat in their living rooms, with the very notion of a flatscreen device being nothing more than a pipe dream.
Now, of course, it is harder to buy a television that isn’t a flatscreen than it is to buy one, with LEDs the most common tech used in them.
OLED panels are available in the very best TVs at a cost, but now it looks like even that tech could be about to be replaced.
What is OLED Technology?
Before we look at whether or not OLED tech could be being replaced, it is worth exploring what, exactly, OLED is. The two main technologies used by companies that make televisions are LED and OLED. The majority of new TVs will have an LED screen, which is sometimes called an LCD or NanoCell screen.
Whilst NanoCell is better than LED, they use the same kind of technology, with LED being an acronym for Light-Emitting Diodes. They are backlit, either by being lit from the edge or else being direct lit. The small LEDs that make up the backlight illuminate the pixels of the screen.
@brandon_veza3What is OLED display / monitor and OLED VS LCD difference
Recent technology such as full array dimming and NanoCell technology have seen LED tech close the gap on OLED, but OLED remains the best that you can get. OLED is itself an acronym, this time for Organic Light-Emitting Diode. There is no backlight required for it to work, with each pixel illuminated by self-emitting diodes by generating light of their own.
This means that the picture quality is superb, all whilst using less energy than LED televisions will use. It is why OLED became the leading technology used in the best-quality TVs, whilst LED sets tend to be much cheaper.
Micro RGB Panels
Samsung are looking to break the mould when it comes to how OLED televisions work. The company has been using Micro RGB panels on its TVs that are 100 inches and larger, with the feeling being that they might be about to use it on smaller screens that they produce.
Given the fact that television manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to make the screens that they offer larger, brighter and sharper than the ones that came before, the ability to alter the technology that they use could be considered to be a game-changing factor in the desire to win over customers.
The aim of using Micro RGB panels is that they can present you with many of the benefits of OLED tech whilst also being as bright as LED screens. LED also has a longer lifespan than OLED, so the hope is that Micro RGB panels will also be able to outlast their OLED cousins.
The downside is that it is still a display that is backlit rather than being self-emitting, yet Samsung are confident that it works well enough to mean that they could start to trickle the technology down to its smaller screens as they look to take a firm hold of a competitive marketplace for those buying TVs.
How it Works
The Micro RGB system introduced a dense layer of red, green and blue LEDs that are sub-100 micrometres in size. Whilst they’re still backlit, it allows for a fine-tuning of light output that can be significantly more precise than the Mini-LED set-ups that screens currently use.
The promise is a punchier visual than LED televisions currently offer, rivalling the impressive look of OLED TVs. One of the major benefits is that there is no risk of burn-in, which people have come to expect to happen to their OLED televisions over time, as well as being available for less money than OLEDs.
Just in case anyone wants to see the difference and why it matters.
OLED versus LCD pic.twitter.com/vFK9ChcSui
— TeeJ Tech (@Big__TeeJ) April 3, 2025
Samsung are also using a dedicated AI engine alongside the new panel, which allows for real-time processing and analysis of each frame, autocorrecting the colours as needed to ensure that everything looks as bright and impressive as possible.
Where Samsung lead, other companies will also surely follow suit, knowing that bridging the gap between the expense of OLED and the convenience of LEDs could be a game-changing move in the TV world. At the moment, it is just their most expensive TVs that offer it as well as their largest, but that is unlikely to be the case for long.