We caught up with LG Display at CES 2023 to better understand what’s behind the Meta technology of the new OLED TVs that promise record brightness of up to 2,100 cd/m².
In the halls of CES 2023, a pitched battle is taking place. That of LG and Samsung, a battle as old as the world between two Korean giants of new technologies. And, since the arrival of QD-OLED from Samsung in 2022, LG and Samsung, and other TV manufacturers like Panasonic, have been doing everything to have the brightest OLED screens.
Why is the brightness so low on the OLED?
Brightness is, in fact, one of the issues when we talk about OLED. Why ? On an OLED display, each individual pixel can control its brightness. For example, if you have an image of a white circle surrounded by a black background, only the pixels in the white circle will light up, while the surrounding pixels will be off. This is what OLED is capable of such prowess in contrast and color compared to LED technologies.
There is therefore significant research regarding the path taken by light, knowing that OLED materials prevent this light from propagating around it. A significant part of the generated light is blocked, it then generates heat.
Why ? This is due to a physical characteristic that says that when light passes from a high refractive index material to a low refractive index material, a large portion of the light turns into heat. Here, there may be old physics lessons that come to mind. We can sum it up to the fact that the light that travels from one medium (the OLED materials) to another with a higher density (the air), and therefore a large part of the light is reflected in the material of origin.
This means that one of the challenges is finding ways to change the angle of the light as it leaves the device and enters the air. This is the key to improving the amount of light the user sees. And, to avoid mixing all the pixels, there must be a light extraction device for each pixel. Given the millions of pixels and sub-pixels in today’s OLED screens, this is a big problem, but not an insurmountable one. A number of materials are now used to create what amounts to a (micro)lens on each pixel.
As with many technologies, scaling up laboratory processes to mass production levels is proving difficult. As these materials continue to be refined and incorporated into the design and manufacture of OLED displays, panel manufacturers are coming to better OLED displays and lighting.
What is LG Meta? How LG manages to improve the brightness of its televisions?
At CES 2023, LG unveiled its new OLED TVs, including the new M3. The biggest change is for LG OLED evo G3 and M3 series, it is about “Meta” technology to allow these screens to reach a peak of record brightness, up to 2,100 cd/m² (candela per square meter)while the best screens of 2022 barely exceed 1,000 cd/m².
We spoke with LG Display, the entity in charge of the development of OLED panels from LG Electronics and many other manufacturers. Basically and in short, LG Display applied a layer of microlenses over the organic light emitting diodes. With this, the light is reflected inside the screen, causing it to project towards us, greatly improving the efficiency of light extraction, thus increasing the brightness levels.
The manufacturer has called this new technology MLA, or Metal Illuminated Lens Array. To achieve these improvements, OLED panels are manufactured in a novel way to shape the shape of a miniature convex lens. As we told you, you then just have to calculate the angle of the light that is lost inside the OLED panel so that it “bounces” inside the microlenses.
As LG explains, its new LG OLED Meta TVs are not only brighter, they’re also more energy efficient. This is important to meet the requirements of the energy certification of the European Union.
That’s not all, since the Meta technology makes more use of the new sixth generation processor, the Alpha 9 Gen 6. This allows to obtain better voltage stabilization (and consumption), in addition to improving of course the image processing, upscaling And so on. LG remains quite discreet about the operation of this image processing processor, you have to imagine a whole bunch of algorithms. For brightness, LG Display calls it the Meta Booster.
The term “Meta” therefore does not refer to a new OLED panel, but to the union of several factors, exactly as happened with the EX panels. Technically, an LG OLED Meta TV is the union of an OLED MLA panel (that is to say an EVO panel – which uses deuterium as a stabilizer – and the famous lenses) in addition to the new Alpha 9 Gen 6 processor , able to improve screen consumption and apply several improvements in colorimetry and image rendering.
We will have the opportunity to compare the new OLED models from LG with those from Samsung, but also Panasonic, which uses similar technologies.
To follow us, we invite you to download our Android and iOS application. You can read our articles, files, and watch our latest YouTube videos.