Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

OLED monitors just had a major breakthrough

By
A tandem OLED display shown off at Display Week.
Guillaume Chansin / X/Twitter

There’s some hubbub in the world of display tech right now over Tandem OLED. If you missed Apple’s announcement of the new iPad Pro, you’ve probably never heard of Tandem OLED, but it’s already making inroads into other devices. TCL, at Display Week 2024, showed off a slidable Tandem OLED display that could fit into a laptop, and it claims a brightness of more than 2,500 nits.

If you’ve caught our reviews of monitors like the LG UltraGear OLED 27, you’ll know that’s an insane level of brightness. And that all comes down to the Tandem OLED tech. Tandem OLED is so simple that it almost doesn’t seem real. In order to increase the historically low brightness of an OLED panel, you just stack two OLED panels on top of each other to combine their brightness. Simple.

Recommended Videos

It’s easy to understand, but Tandem OLED has been a nut display makers like Samsung have been trying to crack for a few years. With the iPad Pro now sporting the tech, display makers like TCL are debuting their own takes on Tandem OLED.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!
Privacy Policy

TCL CSOT is showing a "slideable" 14-inch 4K tandem OLED.#displayweek2024 pic.twitter.com/SjGWYUtE2J

— Guillaume Chansin (@GChansin) May 14, 2024

Related

You can see the display in action above. It’s slidable, extending from a 12.6-inch shell to a full 14 inches. TCL showed this off in a highly portable laptop, which cuts the trackpad for a slimmer form. This is just a prototype to show off the display, but it’s not hard to imagine laptop brands will take cues from TCL if they decide to implement this design. According to TCL, this display can reduce the overall size of a laptop by about 35%.

The display itself is no slouch, either. As mentioned, TCL claims it can reach 2,500 nits of peak brightness, but it also packs a resolution of 3,840 x 2,400 and comes with a 120Hz refresh rate. Even more impressive, TCL claims its display reduces power consumption by 30% compared to normal OLED screens and extends the lifespan by more than 3.5 times. That’s good news for anyone worried about OLED burn-in.

Display Week, as you might expect, is a time for display makers to show off their cutting-edge tech, so it might be some time before we see TCL’s screen in a real device. It’s certainly an exciting step for OLED, however, tackling both brightness and burn-in with impressive results.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Jacob Roach
Jacob Roach
Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
This app promises to prevent OLED burn-in, but don’t fall for it
An OLED display with burn-in.

If you want to strike fear into the heart of any OLED monitor owner, just mention "burn-in." Although OLED displays have quickly infiltrated the ranks of the best gaming monitors, burn-in remains the key concern for adopting the display tech. A new app, called OLED Guard Pro, says it can prevent burn-in, resulting in "longer screen life, reduced power bills, and a viewing experience that feels fresh every day."

I use an OLED monitor daily, my trusty KTC G42P5, so I downloaded OLED Guard Pro to see if it would finally put my admittedly small burn-in fears to rest. And although the app works mostly as advertised, I'm skeptical that it will actually prevent image retention in the way the app claims.
Meet OLED Guard Pro

Read more
AMD may have transformed this thin and light laptop into a gaming powerhouse
The Asus Zenbook S 16 sitting on a coffee table.

AMD has a new driver for its latest Ryzen AI 300 processors, and it introduces a feature that could provide a massive performance boost in games. It's called Variable Graphics Memory, or VGM, and it allows the integrated graphics to convert up to 75% of the memory in a system to dedicated graphics memory. This, according to AMD, can not only boost performance in games, but also make some otherwise unplayable titles boot.

The new Ryzen AI 300 processors are mostly found in thin and light laptops, including devices like the Zenbook S 16 that aren't targeted at gamers. In addition to VGM in the new driver, AMD also turned on its Fluid Motion Frames 2 (AFMF 2) feature for Ryzen AI 300 processors. With both features working in tandem, you can see the performance boost on the Zenbook S 16 below.

Read more
This free app is just what my small form factor PC needed
The RTX 4090 inside the Fractal Terra case.

I love my small form factor gaming PC, but I'll admit, it's not perfect. I crammed the RTX 4090 inside a case the size of a toaster, leaving little to no room for a cooler on top of my Ryzen 7 7800X3D. That's led to high fan noise and concerning temperatures as I weave in and out of games, keeping me on the edge of my seat as to if my PC is operating within safe conditions. But I may have found a solution to put my worries to rest.

It's called Camomile, which claims to offer a "one-click undervolt" for your CPU. It sounds like nonsense, and there's a certain level of marketing surrounding the app targeted at the tech illiterate -- if you know the developer, Outbyte, that probably doesn't come as a surprise. Much to my surprise, however, Camomile lowered my CPU temperatures while only sacrificing a hair of performance, which was all the more shocking considering how straightforward it was to use.
A note of caution

Read more