LG Display and UL Solutions say that the latest and greatest new WOLED TV panels have finally achieved a key milestone after being certified for “perfect picture quality” in brightly lit living rooms.
The lack of brightness in OLED TVs has always been one of their biggest handicaps, and even today, the most advanced models cannot match the performance of the best new Mini-LED LCD televisions in this department.
The brightness deficiency of OLED can make these televisions a no-go for some consumers, if they spend a lot of time watching shows and movies during the daytime, when their living rooms might be exposed to the full force of our closest star.
However, with the arrival of LG Display’s new "four-layer" RGB Tandem OLED panels this year, the company reckons it has finally boosted brightness enough that anyone watching in sun-splashed living rooms will no longer have anything to complain about. bright enough
LG Displays says RGB Tandem OLED -- found on TVs such as the LG G5 OLED and Panasonic Z95B -- increases full-screen brightness, which is a term that means when the entire display is illuminated white, has been bumped up to around 350-400 nits. That’s up from an average of just 150 nits on older-generation OLED models that used a standard panel, meaning it’s around two-and-a-half times brighter.
In addition, LG Display says peak brightness (which refers to just a small part of the screen) has been increased to more than 2,500 nits in “calibrated mode”, and an incredible 3,500 nits in “vivid mode”. That compares to just 600 nits on a standard OLED panel.
We should note that 400 nits full-screen brightness isn’t as good as some of the latest and best Mini-LED TVs, with new models from the likes of Hisense and TCL going as high 800 nits, but LG Displays says it’s enough to make a real difference.
To prove its point, it gave a few of its RGB Tandem OLED displays – which also have a special anti-glare coating – to the independent certification company UL Solutions. They were then put through their paces in a series of tests by UL, which came to the conclusion that they’re bright enough to avoid any negative impact on picture quality in brightly lit rooms.
LG Display said that its “fourth-generation OLED panels have been verified by UL Solutions, a global leader in applied safety science, for Perfect Reproduction technology under lighting conditions of up to 500 lux, which is the brightness of a living room in broad daylight.”
The certification applies to both SDR and HDR content and means they can “perfectly reproduce content at a level of visual quality typically only found in darkened movie theatres”, the company said. This holds true when they’re set up in the brightest living rooms exposed to the full force of summer sunshine, the company explained.
UL Solutions said its certification covers both colour and brightness reproduction, and verifies that more than 95% of the display’s “original 4K test images” were accurately reproduced under the brightest possible living room conditions.
HDTVTest's Vincent Teoh explains the secret behind the RGB Tandem OLED panel's increased brightness here:
Earlier this year, Samsung Display roped UL Solutions into testing its latest QD-OLED panel, and it verified that its 300-nit brightness matched the performance of a 500-nit Mini-LED TV in terms of perceived brightness.
In other words, if these claims hold true, then the latest WOLED and QD-OLED TVs should no longer have any problems with sunny environments, meaning daytime viewing or gaming without disruption is viable at last.
