The world of home entertainment reached an inflection point over the last decade thanks to a display technology that fundamentally transforms how screens produce colors and contrast. I‘m talking about OLED.
Understanding OLED – The Greatest Advancement for TVs
OLED, which stands for organic light emitting diodes, revolutionized television picture quality by utilizing a completely different method to illuminate pixels compared to conventional LED/LCD screens.
Rather than requiring a backlight with separate filters to block areas that should appear black, each OLED pixel contains specialized organic compounds that emit their own light when electricity passes through. This enables elite levels of control, allowing each pixel to turn completely off to manifest perfect black levels without any light bleed.
The implications go beyond just black levels though. Thanks to independent pixel-level illumination, OLED panels can also optimize color accuracy along with brightness adjustments scene-by-scene. This leads to phenomenal contrast and vivid images that make content feel more immersive.
In fact, according to DisplayMate’s lab analysis, current LG OLED TVs can achieve 1,000,000:1 contrast ratios. That figure obliterates anything LED/LCD screens produce by a staggering margin.
Initially commercialized in 2008, early OLED screens were exclusively manufactured by specialty tech companies to supply high-end camera viewfinders and prototypical head-mounted displays. However, after nearly 15 years fine-tuning materials and fabrication techniques, OLED technology finally became economically viable for mass-market consumer televisions starting in 2013-2014.
LG Quickly Establishes OLED Dominance for TVs
When OLED televisions first hit the scene, they exclusively came from "early adopter" brands. Sony, Panasonic and Samsung raced to establish first-mover advantage. But while Japanese tech conglomerate Sony found modest success selling OLED TVs to luxury buyers, Samsung and Panasonic failed to scale production. The prohibitively high costs combined with low yields forced them to prematurely bow out from the OLED TV race by 2015.
Korean powerhouse LG Electronics, despite being a display panel manufacturer, took a patient approach before fully pursuing OLED screens for television use cases. However, a single strategic business decision instantly catapulted LG from an underdog to undisputed leader in the burgeoning space.