According to reports, Samsung Electronics will use LG Display panels in its new OLED TVs, with 1 million panels to be delivered before the end of the year and another 4 million ordered for next year. Company executives met recently to agree to the deal, which marks a major shift among the South Korean electronics giants.
Read: LG will no longer be making smartphones
In recent years, LG has stretched it led in display technology innovation and its OLED displays always rank as the industry’s best. Samsung has been struggling to keep up in the OLED space and quit the market about a decade ago and has instead focused on its QLED technology. QLED is simply an LCD panel with quantum dots, or really small pixels, to offer better display quality.
Today, LG Display already supplies OLED panels for several other TV manufacturers (many of which used to use Samsung panels), like Sony, Vizio, and Hisense. LG’s innovation with OLED technology has meant the prices of these TVs has been falling quickly, and as a result LG Display has been expanding its OLED production lines significantly. Their total OLED manufacturing capabilities currently sit at around 8 million units per year but will expand further during the year.
As the market moves towards OLED displays, Samsung has had to concede and buy panels from LG. While their QLED displays are impressive, nothing can compare to OLED when it comes to clarity, colour reproduction and saturation and deep black imagery. It is another indication that Samsung is moving away from its LCD product lines, after it said last year that it would stop producing LCD panels in the years to come. Many expected this meant that they were nearly ready to unveil their own OLED range, but perhaps it is slightly further away than previously thought, hence their need to buy from LG Display.
A previous report revealed that Samsung is working on Quantum Dot OLED (QD-OLED), but the technology isn’t ready yet. Some QD-OLED panel samples shown off at Samsung were reportedly criticized for low brightness.
