Primary RGB Tandem OLED TV tech explained: how it works, why it’s better than MLA and how it compares with QD-OLED

It’s amazing what a bit of competition can do. After an age of OLED TVs mostly just nudging forward year on year with a few nits of extra brightness here and a bit more colour there, the arrival of Samsung’s QD-OLED technology three years ago has inspired a veritable stampede of OLED innovation as LG Display looks to fend off competition for its traditional WOLED approach.

For 2025, this rivalry has led LG Display, which supplies the vast majority of OLED TV panels in the market (and is distinct to LG Electronics, which produces actual TVs such as the new C5 and G5), to create a new OLED panel technology inelegantly named Primary RGB Tandem which, on paper at least, doesn’t so much rewrite the OLED brightness rule book as rip it up and throw it in the bin.

What exactly is a Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel?

The traditional core OLED panels previously produced by LG Display for more than a decade have created colour by using two blue light-emitting layers sandwiching a third layer that combines the other red, green and yellow colours required to create a colour picture.

For 2023 and 2024, LG Display responded to the high brightness being achieved by Samsung’s QD-OLED panels with something called MLA (Micro Lens Array) OLED, which saw an array of tiny lenses being added to the panel structure that could focus more light directly out of the screen.

With QD-OLED continuing to push brightness forward for 2025, though, LG Display has responded again. And this time the solution has been to remove the lens array but introduce a new four-layer design where individual red and green layers are each illuminated by separate blue ‘emissive’ layers.

How much difference can Primary RGB Tandem OLED panels make?

LG Display suggests that ‘four-stack’ Primary RGB Tandem OLED panels are technically capable of hitting peak brightness levels of up to 4000 nits. That would represent a brightness increase of around a third over last year’s OLED panels – a remarkable leap for a single OLED generation that looks even more remarkable given that it comes on top of the also-revolutionary brightness leap provided by the previous Micro Lens Array approach.

We’re yet to get any of the new Primary RGB Tandem OLED TVs in for full review in our dedicated test rooms (we expect the LG G5 imminently), but experience suggests the theoretical peak brightness levels claimed by LG Display won’t fully translate to consumer TVs – at least when it comes to showing real-world content.

Philips, though, has publicly stated that its new premium OLED950 and OLED910 TVs, which both use the new four-stack technology, can deliver peak brightness levels of 3700 nits – up from the 3000 nits achieved by the brand’s previous flagship OLEDs. Philips also claims its new four-stack OLEDs can hit full-screen brightness levels of 350 nits, up from 300 nits previously.

The peak brightness figures quoted by both LG Display and Philips will doubtless be measured on very small areas of an HDR image, and will likely only be sustainable over very short bursts. But these are the same conditions used for measuring the previous MLA OLED claims.

The new Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel design not only produces significantly more brightness than previous LG Display panels, but also enables that extra brightness to be produced more efficiently. In fact, LG Display states that the 65-inch version of its new screen design is as much as 20 per cent more power-efficient than the equivalent 2024 panel.

While staying in the ‘nits race’ by pushing for ever more high dynamic range-friendly brightness is important, given that there’s a brightness-toting rival in town, adding more brightness can bring potential dangers such as raised black levels and washed-out colours. OLED’s self-emissive nature, though, where each pixel makes its own light, means that the new four-stack Primary RGB Tandem panels shouldn’t, on paper at least, have any negative impact on OLED’s renowned black-level prowess.

And LG Display claims that its new panel design actually improves colour purity and range response, upping coverage of the so-called DCI-P3 colour gamut used for most HDR mastering from 98.5% to 99.5%, while coverage of the much wider Rec.2020 spectrum is now reported to be as high as 82-83% – which is essentially on a par with QD OLED.

Early demonstrations suggest that the new LG Display panel also features new anti-reflection technology that significantly reduces the ‘halo’ effect around reflected light points. This development is likely not directly connected, though, with the Primary RGB Tandem four-stack panel structure.

Are there any downsides to Primary RGB Tandem OLED technology?

We have only seen short demonstrations of the new OLED technology so far, running on pre-production displays, so it’s too early to say if there are any really significant problems with the new technology.

We have seen signs of dark scenes looking a little greyer than they do on previous OLED technology, and occasional evidence of a lack of refinement when resolving near-black details. The only thing we’ve seen, though, that we don’t expect to be substantially resolved by image management improvements for the final production models is a slight reduction in viewing angles before pictures suffer with a little colour shift.

Which TVs are going to use Primary RGB Tandem OLED panels?

As mentioned at the start, LG Display doesn’t sell TVs directly. Instead, it creates the core panels that go into the TVs of various consumer electronics brands.

At the time of writing, three TV brands have confirmed that they will be using Primary RGB Tandem OLED panels in their TV ranges for 2025: LG Electronics, Panasonic and Philips.

In LG Electronic’s case, the new panels will be found in its G5 and M5 OLED ranges. Specifically the 55-, 65-, 77- and 83-inch sizes of the G5, and the M5 series’ 65-, 77- and 83-inch models. Both series use a new Alpha 11 processor to optimise the new panel’s performance.

Panasonic’s flagship Z95B TV range will offer the new panels across all three of its 55-, 65- and 77-inch sizes – an improvement on the Z95A range, where only the 55- and 65-inch screens in the range benefitted from the then state-of-the-art MLA technology. The Z95Bs also exclusively partner the new four-stack panels with a proprietary cooling solution called ThermaFlow to help dissipate the heat that can potentially cause permanent image retention issues.

Philips (Europe), meanwhile, will be using Primary RGB Tandem panels in its premium OLED950 and OLED910 ranges. The OLED910 will be available in 55-, 65- and 77-inch screen sizes, while the OLED950, with its more powerful two-chip processing engines, will ship in 65- and 77-inch sizes.

We look forward to fully reviewing all of those sets in due course, and we’ll be updating this explainer with our Primary RGB Tandem findings once we have.