LG Display said at an industry event last week it will expand its OLED panel lineup next year, to include 20-inch displays for laptops and monitors.
The company has for a long time focused on much larger OLED panel sizes for the consumer TV market. It also manufactures small OLED panels for smartphones and smart watches, but there's not much on offer in the mid-sized range. At present, LG Display's smallest OLED TV panel is 42-inches.
At a forum hosted by the Korea Display Industry Association, LG Display Vice President Kang Won-seok said the company will unveil a 20-inch OLED panel by the end of the year. The panel will be aimed at "personal devices", The Elec reported. Demand for such displays has risen during the pandemic, Kang added, so the new panel size is designed to meet that demand.
LG Display had said in 2021 that it was planning to target the "20-30 inch range" with its OLED displays. At the time, it said it was considering the smaller panels for TVs, gaming, mobility and personal displays.
The South Korean company didn't say anything about its plans for mass production, so it's not clear if the 20-inch panel will be ready to appear in new monitors and laptops in 2023, or if it will only be made available for customers to test. It did not offer any details about resolution or other specs.
What Kang did talk about was that, in terms of OLED panels aimed at gaming, the company is focused on creating a more "immersive reality". That's different to OLED panels aimed at TVs, where it aims to deliver "natural reality". Kang explained that faster response times are one of the top priorities for gaming. In addition, he said the company is working hard to ensure its OLED gaming displays can maintain resolution even when the ambient light is too bright.
Elsewhere, Kang said LG Display is working to create bendable OLED displays for the gaming industry and said it is currently holding talks with one customer regarding this development. The idea is that gamers will be able to control the curvature of the screen, adjusting it for each game they're playing, Kang said.
Kang pointed out that LG Display's White OLED technology only uses a single substrate, so it's the only company that can create such a display. That was clearly a dig at Samsung Display's QD-OLED tech, which is built using two glass substrates and therefore doesn't offer the same flexibility. Samsung Display is a rival to LG Display in the personal display market, having started mass production of a 34-inch curved QD-OLED display that's used in gaming monitors such as Alienware's 34 QD-OLED Gaming Display.
In a final update, Kang said LG Display will also launch a 77-inch transparent OLED panel next year. At present, the largest transparent OLED display made by LG measures just 55-inches.
Last week, at another industry event in Seoul, South Korea, LG Display unveiled a massive 97-inch OLED.EX display that's able to produce its own sound, similar to how Sony’s Acoustic Surface Audio Plus technology works.
