LG Display says it has put the world’s first “Tandem OLED displays” for gaming laptops and notebooks into mass production, and the first products will launch later this year, including a 13-inch laptop made by Dell Technologies.
The company explains that its Tandem OLED displays are a more complex, and therefore premium product that delivers superior picture performance when compared to conventional OLED panels. Of course, even standard OLED displays produce much better pictures than the regular LCD panels used in most laptops.
The difference between Tandem and regular is that the former uses two stacks of red, green and blue OLED pixel layers, whereas the latter only uses a single stack.
This multi-stack approach apparently triples the brightness of OLED displays compared to a single-stack version, and also makes them last twice as long, LG Display insisted. Another benefit is reduced power consumption, with the company claiming a 40% gain in energy efficiency. Therefore, Tandem OLED is ideal for “high-performance” devices such as AI laptops, the company said.
The very first Tandem OLED panels will be 13-inches and offer a 2,800x1,800 resolution, with coverage of 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut. Intriguingly, despite using multiple layers of RGB pixels, LG Display claimed that the Tandem OLED panels are actually 40% thinner than standard OLED laptop displays, and weigh 28% less. The displays are also touch-capable, the company said.
The announcement by LG Display was not unexpected, as the South Korean website The Elec last month reported that the company is planning on supplying Tandem OLED displays to Dell, which will use them in its forthcoming Dell XPS13 laptops. However, The Elec said Dell will use a version of the panel with a higher resolution.
According to The Elec, LG has agreed to ship an initial 100,000 Tandem OLED panels to Dell, with further shipments to come, based on demand for the new laptops. It’s not clear whether or not any other laptop makers have placed orders for the Tandem OLED displays.
We have previously seen Tandem OLED panels appear in Apple’s M4 iPad Pro device, which was unveiled earlier this year and will use panels from both LG Display and Samsung Display. The technology is much older though, having first appeared in automotive displays way back in 2019.