It’s all about the deuterium, stupid.
It looks as if the long-awaited OLED hardware shift we finally saw happen in premium 2021 TVs was just the start of a new era of OLED picture quality innovation. Today LG Display, the company that manufactures pretty much all the OLED panels that ultimately find their way into OLED TVs, has announced new ‘OLED EX’ panels which, it claims, can deliver as much as 30% more brightness than ‘conventional OLED displays’.
It should be said right away that this statement is a little vague; last year’s new premium displays delivered as much as 20% more brightness than previous ‘conventional’ OLEDs. So LG Display could be saying here that the new EX technology only actually delivers 10% more brightness than those ‘evo’ displays, rather than 30% more brightness than any previous OLED TV. Photo: LG Display
LG Display does, though, go to the trouble of explaining in more technical detail than usual how OLED EX , works, with the main advancement centering around the use of Deuterium in the OLED EX panels’ organic light emitting diodes. Deuterium enables such diodes to emit stronger light levels, but the material’s use in OLED displays has been hindered previously by the fact that very little Deuterium can be found in the natural world. According to LG Display, normally only one atom of Deuterium, which is around twice as heavy as Hydrogen, is found in around every 6,000 regular Hydrogen atoms.
LG Display has discovered a method, though, of not only extracting deuterium from water, but stabilising the resulting compounds so that they can be applied to OLED pixels, allowing them to output more light while maintaining high levels of efficiency over long periods of time.