Several Chinese brands showed off new dual-cell LCD TV panel technology which could potentially match the performance of OLED, during last week’s Display Week 2019 conference in San Jose, California. 

The dual-cell LCD panels, which were made by companies including BOE Display and China Star Optoelectronics Technology, feature a rather unique architecture wherein a monochrome LCD panel is placed directly behind a regular colour LCD panel, Display Daily reported. The effect of the monochrome panel is that it helps to modulate backlighting, creating a much larger number of dimming zones and producing higher contrast ratios. It also helps to eliminate the “halo effect” seen at the edges of some LCD displays. 

Hisense had previously shown off the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January in its ULED XD TV lineup, pairing it with a new chipset and image processing algorithm that combine to produce “incredibly deep blacks and dazzling brightness,” the company said at the time.

According to Display Daily, the dual-cell displays are capable of producing OLED-like performance at low to medium luminance, and LCD-like performance at higher luminance levels. 

Elsewhere, Nanosys showed off a prototype Hisense ULED XD TV using a dual-cell panel combined with its quantum dot technology. 

“The set looked startlingly good, as did the dual-cell panels showed by BOE and CSOT,” Ken Werner of Nutmeg Consultants wrote in Display Daily. He added that Hisense hopes to bring the TV featuring dual-cell LCD panel tech to market by 2020. However, Hisense will most likely end up using a panel from Innolux with a modulator at UltraHD, instead of the UltraHD panel with FullHD modulator used by BOE.  

“With their inky blacks, saturated colors, and bright highlights, images on the Hisense set were almost mesmerizing,” Werner added. 

The good news is that dual-cell LCD panels probably won’t be that expensive either, as the architecture can most likely operate with just two polarisers, Werner said. 

Hisense claimed that its dual-cell panel demo has a luminous efficiency of 4%, which compares very well with the 6% luminous efficiency of typical single-cell LCD panels.