News JVTech Samsung, LG… the OLED TVs of 2023 will burn your retina
Published on 04/01/2023 at 17:11
If you are directly or indirectly interested in the small world of high-end 4K TVs, you must already know everything about OLED technology. In 2023, Samsung’s QD OLED and LG’s classic OLED will pass a dazzling milestone. We tell you about it.
Reminder of the basics: what is OLED technology on 4K TVs?
Before explaining how the 4K OLED TVs of 2023 will evolve enormously, we must understand where they start from. So here is some background on OLED technology in general.
OLED has imposed itself on the high end to solve a painful problem present on absolutely all conventional LED TVs: the contrast. As a reminder, the contrast on a television represents the difference in intensity between the lightest and darkest areas of the image.
This contrast problem is due to a technological limitation: basic LED TVs have a whole backlight panel. Put simply, this means that builders should place a large, glowing panel that spits out white light just below the screen. This light is then filtered to give you a wide range of colors. As the backlight panel is permanently on on LED TVs, the black often tends towards gray and, in general, all the colors are a bit bland, lacking in depth.
The feat of OLED is to remove this backlight panel. Each pixel generates its own light (we then speak of self-emissive pixels) and adapts directly to the projected image. When it should display black, the pixel simply turns off. Result : since the blacks are perfect, the contrast of an OLED screen is said to be “infinite”.
Nothing drools, the viewing angles are crazy, everything is perfect. All ? Not really. In the early days of OLED, techno posed 3 major problems :
1. When a vivid and static image remained for too long (a bright red life bar, a continuous news channel logo…), it could “burn” the screen and remain etched on the TV for life. Nowadays, manufacturers have put in place a lot of things so that this problem no longer arises (automatic cleaning of pixels, detection of risk areas, alternation of active pixels, reductions in brightness, etc.). The mission is successful : so-called burn problems are a thing of the past.2. In the mid-2010s, it was extremely complicated and extremely expensive to produce large size OLED panels. The first 4K TVs equipped with this technology cost a fortune and stocks were too limited. Worse, only one factory in the world, belonging to LG, was able to manufacture OLED TV panels, all the other brands were supplied by the Korean giant. In 2022, OLED began to become more popular and Samsung started building its own panels. Well, OLED remains reserved for the high end and always costs more than the good old LED, mBut today’s prices are incomparable to those practiced a few years ago. 3. Removing the backlight panel is nice, but without it it’s difficult to achieve a very high level of brightness. To fully enjoy a 4K OLED TV, it was better to be in the dark. Where Samsung was already managing to pass 2000 candelas per square meter on its Mini-LED TVs, the peak brightness of OLED was struggling to reach 1000. Placing an OLED TV in a room with direct light was a big problem…until this year. 
Samsung’s 2023 OLED TVs are so bright they’ll sting your eyes
In 2023, OLED brightness issues are definitely a thing of the past. On the occasion of CES 2023, the largest high-tech event in the world currently underwayLG has just announced that its most high-end OLED TVs of the year should gain 70% brightness. Last year’s LG OLED Evo panels flirted with 1000 candelas per square meter. In theory, we should therefore reach around 1700 cd/m².
The feat is already crazy, but Samsung goes even further. According to the manufacturerthe top of the range 4K QD-OLED TV from Samsung, baptized Samsung S95C, should reach 2000 candelas per square meter. We are waiting for the level of the Mini-LED… it’s monstrous. With so much light, your eyes will even hurt if you watch TV in the dark. The OLED will soon have no more faults…
Now, what is QD-OLED? When we talk about self-emitting diodes, we are actually talking about white light. Usually, we put a red / green / blue filter on top of this white light to get all the shades of color on the screen.
This is the big difference with what the QD-OLED offers. Samsung Display’s self-emitting diodes are blue diodes. Here, no filter, but the famous “Quantum Dots” (quantum dots) characteristic of QLED technology. These Quantum Dot are nano-crystals that react to the passage of light. It is these nano-crystals that will take care of the green and the red.
After a year of commercialization, QD-OLED technology passes a major milestone in 2023. The new Samsung S95C will be much thinner, will be entitled to remote connectivity on the famous “One Connect” box, to a fluidity of 144 Hz (like a PC gamer screen…), and to a brightness of 2000 nits.
The competition just has to watch out.
