One of the display industry's most anticipated events, SID Display Week is taking place this week and once again it has revealed a hotbed of innovation , with dozens of bizarre, wonderful and eye-catching concepts on show.
They include an intriguing pair of shape-shifting, bezel-less MicroLED displays that can slot together in a seamless fashion to form a single, larger display, the first-ever “Dream OLED” and yet more flexible OLED and MicroLED form factors.
One of the most startling attractions was LG Display’s bezel-less 22-inch MicroLED displays, which are capable of operating independently before merging into a single, visually seamless ultra-wide display that acts as one.
LG Display said it’s an example of how a bezel-free design can offer both aesthetic and practical benefits, while also talking about the superior pixel-level control, higher colour accuracy and “perfect” blacks associated with MicroLED.
The zero-bezel concept will enable possibilities such as modular displays that can come in almost any shape or size one could conceive of, LG Display said. It believes they’re likely to be especially useful in commercial scenarios, though it says some PC gamers or graphics designers may also be interested in the idea. It could allow them to work on two screens at once, and then create a single, ultra-wide display when they only need to work with one.
Other benefits of MicroLED include the lack of burn-in problems that are commonly associated with OLED. The technology is also said to have a longer lifespan, but the challenge continues to be higher costs. Compared to OLED, the prices of MicroLED displays are astronomical, and analysts say display makers will need to reduce production costs by as much as 90% for them to become commercially viable.
LG Display also impressed SID attendees with its first-ever “Dream OLED” display, based on its recently announced phosphorescent blue OLED technology. PHOLED drops the fluorescent blue materials used in traditional OLED displays, and is said to be far more efficient, enabling lower energy consumption and higher brightness. It was hailed last month as a groundbreaking development, with green and red OLED pixels already made from phosphorescent materials.
The 13-inch blue PHOLED display is still a prototype, designed for tablets and laptops, but it’s pretty much a certainty that LG Display is planning to follow up with actual products.
“Blue phosphorescent OLED is the result of LG Display’s implementation of a newly developed hybrid two-stack Tandem OLED structure," the company said. "By featuring blue phosphorescence in the upper stack of this structure, the IT panel exhibited at SID Display Week 2025 consumes about 15% less power than existing OLED panels."
Not to be outdone, Samsung Display also captivated the attention of attendees, showing off an entirely new display technology that’s based on electroluminescent quantum dots. It was previously known as QD-LED tech, but has since been renamed by Samsung Display as EL-QD, and like MicroLED, it has immense potential.
Whereas Samsung’s existing QD-OLED displays use photoluminescence to emit light via a quantum dot colour conversion layer, EL-QD utilises an inorganic electroluminescence technology that allows each of the RGB pixels to be made up entirely of quantum dots that can emit light directly.
Samsung Display said EL-QD will deliver improved colour accuracy and reduce power consumption significantly. It showed off a 264 PPI high-resolution prototype EL-QD panel at SID, with a peak brightness of 400 nits. According to the company, this is a 50% improvement on its earlier 250-nit prototypes, and achieves the highest luminance among all EL-QD prototypes disclosed to date.
That suggests that brightness is still a sticking point in the development of EL-QD displays, and it’s not yet clear when the technology will become commercially available. At 500 nits, its brightness still falls some way short of the best OLED and Mini-LED displays, though it is probably bright enough for most applications.
Samsung added that its latest EL-QD prototype has a much longer lifespan than earlier ones, thanks to improvements in the durability of its blue materials.
Elsewhere, the company unveiled its first ever prototype of a 5,000 pixels-per-inch RGB Micro Si OLED, or OLED on Silicon (OLEDoS) display. OLEDoS is a novel pixel-packing technology that combines the organic light emitting diodes of OLED with monocrystalline silicon wafers to create more compact displays with much higher resolutions. Other benefits include more rapid response times and improved contrast, Samsung Display said.
According to the company, OLEDoS can help to minimise the size of OLED pixels to just “tens of micrometres”. The most likely application of this technology is in the emerging virtual reality and extended reality markets. There were two prototype OLEDoS displays shown at SID, with one being a 1.4-inch screen that’s able to deliver higher resolution than an 8K television, with a peak brightness of an incredible 15,000 nits. The display also boasted a 120Hz refresh rate and covered up to 99% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut.
As for the second prototype, this was a slightly bigger 4,200 PPI RGB OLEDoS panel featuring a whopping 20,000 nits peak brightness, meaning it’s four-times brighter than the OLEDoS panel the company showed off at last year’s SID event.
All in all, OLEDoS sounds pretty incredible, and it will be interesting to see what future applications emerge from this concept.
Last but not least, Samsung Display also had a new “multi axis stretchable” MicroLED display on show. This concept was first seen at last year’s SID, and it’s very similar to the stretchable OLED displays developed by LG Display.
The company showed attendees a screen that can be flexed in multiple directions at once, similar to the surface of a sea with choppy waves. There are peaks that can rise up, or down, perhaps to help certain aspects of whatever content is being displayed to stand out. You have to see it to fully appreciate it:
Last week, when LG Display announced its similarly-flexible OLED tech, it said it was looking to use it in automotive touchscreen displays, where it could enable users to ‘feel’ buttons and avoid the need to take their eyes off the road. Samsung Display didn’t say so, but it seems likely that its flexy MicroLED might have similar applications.
