Samsung has manufactured the organic matrix that incorporates this television, but this is only one of the ingredients in the recipe. An essential one, of course, but if it is not accompanied by well-executed image processing and minimally competent factory calibration, among other factors that also profoundly impact image quality, no matter how good, the panel will not be able to deliver 100% of its potential.
Sony engineers have earned a reputation for being very skilled in fine-tuning the image processing algorithms and in fine-tuning the calibration their televisions offer us. Especially that of the models that belong to the MASTER Series family. And as we have seen, the one we are about to analyze is one of them.
This is our first review of a QD-OLED TV, so its panel will inevitably take up much of the limelight in this article. A few days ago, I saw Samsung’s S95BA OLED in action, which also incorporates such a matrix, and I was surprised. Much. We can be sure that this analysis will give us solid emotions for image enthusiasts.
In theory, removing the RGB filter should allow the panel to deliver a superior brightness delivery capacity when measuring the average value and the peaks. And in addition, the nanocrystals should be able to reproduce a significantly more expansive colour space than the RGB colour filter.
However, the changes that Samsung proposes in the face of W-OLED technology do not end here. Unlike LG Display’s OLED panels, which use white pixels, Samsung’s use blue pixels, so the nanocrystals will be responsible for acting on blue light to generate the other two primary colours (red and green).
This transformation is possible thanks to a fascinating property of nanocrystals: their structure allows them to modify the wavelength of light, which is why they manage to manipulate blue light to generate red and green light from it.
Nanocrystals have the peculiar ability to modify the wavelength of light.
Quantum dots are nanocrystals made of semiconductor materials with curious properties. And its size is so tiny that its behaviour is described by the laws of quantum mechanics and could not be explained using classical mechanics.
Their electronic characteristics are defined, on the one hand, by their size and, on the other, by their shape, which explains why nanocrystals are currently being used for very different applications, such as photovoltaic technology, biological labelling, elimination of polluting agents… And, of course, in electronics.
The heart of this TV, its QD-OLED panel, explained.
OLED panels’ most relevant quality is their ability to emit light without the need to resort to an external lighting source, something that LCD panels must do. This is possible because they use organic diodes and semiconductor electronic components that allow and control the passage of electric current in only one direction.
The OLED panels manufactured by LG Display are of the W-OLED (‘White OLED’) type.
Unlike conventional diodes, those that use organic material can react to electrical stimulation by emitting light, which is why OLED technology is self-emitting.
So far, there is no difference between the OLED panels that LG manufactures and those that Samsung produces. However, if we stick to their strategy to reproduce the colour, the first significant difference between the two technologies appears. The OLED panels manufactured by LG Display are of the W-OLED (White OLED) type, so the light emitted by each panel’s self-emissive cells is white.
Sonyqd Oled Technology
The problem is that to compose a colour image, we need to obtain the three primary RGB colours (red, green and blue), so it is necessary to place an RGB colour filter on top of the organic diode array capable of reproducing them.
Interestingly, this technology was not initially designed by LG. For many years the company that had made the most efforts to develop OLED technology was Kodak, and in 2004 it made A surprising announcement: it had managed to solve the main disadvantage of RGB OLED panels, which was the premature degradation of blue sub-pixels. In addition, his solution made it possible to manufacture OLED panels with a size much larger than the panels of this type that were produced at that time. And at a lower cost.
The technology that Kodak had implemented was, precisely, White OLED. The American company patented its innovation, but its financial state at that time was not good due, among other reasons, to how much the film photography market had suffered since the end of the 1990s, which was one of Kodak’s primary sources of income.
This situation caused the company’s managers to abandon the development of OLED technology, which is why at the end of 2009, LG bought this business area and the patents it had developed from Kodak for 100 million dollars. The rest is history.
Qd Oled 1
In this image, the two most relevant layers of the QD-OLED panels claim prominence: the matrix of organic diodes responsible for delivering blue light and the layer of nanocrystals accountable for modifying the wavelength of blue light to generate the colours red and green.
The main advantage of the White OLED panels manufactured by LG Display over conventional RGB OLEDs is that, as we have seen, they do not suffer from the premature degradation of the blue sub-pixel. In addition, its production is more straightforward, cheaper and allows to obtain panels with a significantly larger size than RGB OLED panels. However, not all benefits.
