Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on TechRadar.
One of the most-wanted technologies in TV (well, for a certain level of TV nerd) may finally be on its way to your front room: blue phosphor OLED, or blue PhOLED for short. This has been talked about for a long time – we were reporting on advancements back in 2023 – but for several years now, it’s been a promise rather than a product. The signs are good that this is going to change, though.
According to trade site The Elec, another major manufacturer of PhOLED tech is close to mass production. South Korean OLED manufacturer Lordin says it’s already secured production facilities for its own take on PhOLED tech, which it calls ZRIET.
That means we could be on the verge of brighter, more energy-efficient, longer-lasting OLED TVs, because Lordin is not alone. Last year, LG Display announced that it had reached the “commercialization level” of a blue PhOLED panel, and Samsung is very interested in PhOLED, too.
Pixels are blue, da ba dee da ba di
PhOLED uses phosphorescent light emitters rather than fluorescent ones, and those emitters are much more efficient: where fluorescent emitters deliver 25% efficiency (meaning about 25% of the light generated by a pixel actually escapes the pixel so it can reach your eyes), phosphorescent ones can potentially deliver up to 100% using the same amount of energy.
PhOLED has been used for red and green pixels for years, but it’s proven too hard to produce a long-lasting material for blue pixels, which is why we’ve been following news of developments for a long time.
Finally achieving blue PhOLED in OLED displays will mean much brighter and more energy-efficient pixels – so you get a better display without increasing the heat levels that affect pixels’ longevity.
Today’s OLEDs are often capable of delivering much more brightness than they’re calibrated for, but upping the brightness would make them run too hot and reduce their lifespan quite considerably.
Lordin isn’t the only firm investing in PhOLED. So far, the main driver of the technology has been Universal Display Corporation, which supplies key components to LG Display and Samsung Display, but Lordin has come up with an alternative structure that it says makes blue PhOLEDs much easier to manufacture and that gives TV makers an alternative to UDC’s technology.
According to Lordin’s CEO, Oh Young-hyun, the firm’s technology “structurally improves the blue emitter’s efficiency, lifespan, and color purity.”
It’s not only TVs that will benefit from blue PhOLED, of course – any OLED screen could do with being more efficient and longer-lasting. But it’s TVs that have struggled the most with brightness and lifespan, due to people replacing them more slowly than phones and most other tech.
When will we actually see this tech in TVs we can buy? Probably not this year – but the coming-soon timescale is definitely getting shorter. If Lordin’s tech lives up to the promise, maybe it could even beat newer technologies such as QD-EL, which one firm claims could arrive as soon as 2029.
About the Author
Writer, broadcaster, musician, and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites, as well as writing more than twenty books. Her latest, a love letter to music titled Small Town Joy, is on sale now. She is the singer in the spectacularly obscure Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.
