LG Display had already confirmed that it’s planning to use its new, budget-friendly OLED SE panel in some OLED televisions this year (almost certainly the LG B6 OLED TV), but that won’t be the only place where you’ll be able to find them.
A report in Daily Korea indicates that Samsung Electronics is also going to be using the OLED SE panel. Most presumably, it’ll use the OLED SE panel in its upcoming Samsung S85H OLED TV, which is set to be the most affordable option in its 2026 OLED TV lineup, sitting below the S90H and flagship S95H models.
This hasn’t been confirmed officially, but the report said that Samsung intends to increase the number of OLED displays it’s buying from LG Display by 30% this year. All told, it's set to order 1.3 million OLED panels from its rival, up from one million last year. The order is said to include a substantial quantity of OLED SE panels.
We can infer this because Daily Korea specifically mentioned that Samsung wants to buy “polariser-free panels” from LG Display, and that’s what’s so special about the OLED SE. It’s the only OLED display manufactured by the Korean firm that doesn’t come with a polariser. The company removed this layer to boost the brightness of the OLED SE display, though of course, such a step does have some drawbacks. The polariser is a special layer that primarily serves to reduce the impact of ambient light that hits the screen, absorbing it to limit those annoying reflections that harm the viewing experience. It helps users to better see what’s on the screen.
By removing the polariser, LG Display says it has managed to increase the brightness of the OLED SE panel to around 1,000 nits, up from approximately 700 nits before. To deal with the increased reflectivity that comes from not having a polariser, LG Display has instead opted to use a special anti-reflective coating that has a measured light reflectance of about 4.4%. Of course, it remains to be seen how effective this will be at deflecting those irksome reflections, but if it can do a good enough job, then the increase in brightness is likely to be highly desirable.
If the reports are accurate, then it may be that Samsung’s S85H is going to be one of the best affordable OLED TVs on the market in 2026, but anyone thinking of buying one should bear in mind that this TV is not going to come with Dolby Vision HDR support. Samsung has never embraced Dolby Vision on any of its TVs, preferring to support only the rival HDR10+ format, but this policy might be more of a problem on its lower-end OLED TVs.
The thing is, Dolby Vision is much more widely supported by streaming services and filmmakers, so there’s a lot more content out there compared to HDR10+. That's critical, because Dolby Vision HDR provides an extremely handy way for dim OLED TVs to overcome their low brightness and render images accurately. Because most content these days is calibrated for displays with 1,000 nits peak brightness, any TV that struggles to go beyond this has to use tone mapping to compensate. Tone mapping refers to the way the TV reduces the excessively bright elements it cannot display, but it doesn’t always work very well, and different tones are often scrunched together, which results in less detailed pictures on screen.
Dolby Vision gets around this because the tone mapping is applied more closely to the creator’s original intent, which means that it’s generally done better. That’s why HDR images tend to reveal much more detail than non-HDR content. The lack of Dolby Vision HDR is less problematic on brighter TVs because tone mapping is less important for rendering detail, but for dimmer TVs, it’s omission could be a big deal.
Given that LG’s B6 OLED TV is likely use the same OLED SE panel as the S85H, Dolby Vision support could give it a significant advantage.
