What everyone needs to know about Tandem OLED and WOLED TVs

• What is WOLED?
• So what is tandem OLED, and what makes it better?
• The elephant in the room

I’ve said it elsewhere, but I sometimes pity people coming into the home theater space in 2026. While the technology is better than ever — a $500 TV might blow away a $1,000 model released just a few years ago — there’s such a large number of terms and standards to know that shopping can be intimidating. HDR alone has four major standards, only two of which are liable to be important going forward.

Panel technology may be the most confusing aspect at the moment. For a long time, all you had to know was that OLED was la crème de la crème. Now, however, it’s not only being challenged by standards like MicroLED, but enhanced versions of itself. In this piece I’m going to distinguish between two technologies, WOLED and tandem OLED, both of which might be more familiar than you’d expect.

What is WOLED?

An old familiar face that still has a place

WOLED is short for white OLED (organlc light-emitting diode). While that term might feel new, it’s likely only because it wasn’t important to distinguish before. The truth is that if you’ve owned any kind of OLED TV in the past, it was probably WOLED-based, since consumer alternatives to WOLED only emerged in 2022. More on that in a moment.

The gist of WOLED is that on its own, a true vanilla version of OLED wouldn’t be great for your living room. This most basic tech passes white light through red, green, and blue color filters, producing the colors you see in each pixel. But the result isn’t very bright, or at least not strong enough for normal viewing conditions. You’d have to watch in a dim room — daylight viewing would be out of the question.

If you’ve owned any kind of OLED TV in the past, it was probably WOLED-based.

WOLED’s solution to this is a fourth, unfiltered white subpixel, which boosts brightness to reasonable levels. In fact, modern WOLED TVs are powerful enough that in scenes with strong highlights, the whites can be blinding. This is enhanced by the primary advantage of OLED: superior contrast, created by the ability to turn individual pixels on and off. Blacks on an OLED are pure. Most LCDs can only get close to black, since they’re dependent on LED backlights that are rarely shut off completely.

What happened in 2022 was the emergence of Samsung’s QD-OLED, the QD standing for quantum dot. This differs from WOLED by starting with blue light, which is actually more intense than white, despite the way your brain might perceive it. This passes through the quantum dots, which emit different colors based on their size. The result is even more impressive color saturation versus WOLED. Notably, QD tech has since spread elsewhere, for instance appearing on Sony TVs.

Other companies have stuck with versions of WOLED, however, including LG, which attempted to compete with QD-OLED using something called MLA (micro lens array) OLED. This helped focus light output. Indeed LG’s third-generation OLED sets can achieve 3,000 nits of peak brightness, enough to be plainly visible in midday sun. Its first-gen OLED products were capped at just 500 nits.

So what is tandem OLED, and what makes it better?

Double the fun

For many people, myself included, the first they’d ever heard of tandem OLED was likely Apple’s 2024 iPad Pro. Up until that point, the company had only used LCDs for iPads. You can also find a tandem display in 2025 Pro models.

Apple’s version of the technology literally stacks two panels together. This might sound ridiculous, but the result is amplified brightness, up to 1,600 nits peak — about 1,000 more than the LCD-based iPad Air. That’s not as bright as newer TVs, of course, but a tablet is usually no more than a couple of feet away from your eyes. Most TV viewers are sitting at least three times as far away, and the inverse-square law dictates that intensity diminishes as a square of the distance from a light source. You actually need higher brightness the further away you are, in other words.

There are other ways of going tandem. For its fourth-gen OLED TVs, LG has developed something dubbed Primary RGB Tandem OLED. This separates a yellow layer (used in the third gen) into separate red and green layers, raising peak brightness to 4,000 nits, and overall color brightness to 2,100. You’re not getting multiple sandwiched panels. Instead, there are simply four layers in the stack, the other two being blue.

The result is a noticeably brighter picture, as well as wider coverage of color gamuts.

There’s both good and bad news here. The good news is that Primary RGB Tandem OLED can also be found in some Panasonic and Philips TVs, and with all three brands, the result is a noticeably brighter picture than previous efforts — no matter what you’re watching. LG in particular claims lower power consumption, as well as wider coverage of the DCI-P3 and Rec.2020 color gamuts, up to 99.5% and 83% respectively. Your eye probably won’t notice the extra color shades, but this does put LG’s tech roughly on par with QD-OLED.

The bad news is that there are very few tandem OLED TVs on the market, and they’re not cheap. As of this writing, the LG G5 starts around $1,800 for a 55-inch model, and the Panasonic Z95B is $2,000. Given that some similarly-sized WOLED sets are selling for $1,200 or less, you have to be deeply obsessed with picture quality to justify the leap. The savings could be put towards a soundbar, a game console, or simply paying off your bills.

Relative to QD-OLED, there may also be slightly inferior detail in near-black shades. For a purist with a fat budget, this might be an issue, given that the best QD-OLED TVs are already as bright as tandem OLED.

The elephant in the room

Some notes on the future

Ultimately, all forms of OLED may be on their way out. Don’t get me wrong — any model you buy today is going to look amazing, and last a very long time as long as you maintain it properly. But within the next few years, OLED could be supplanted by MicroLED and micro RGB, which use microscopic red, green, and blue LEDs. These merge the precision of OLED with the brightness and longevity of LCD/LED panels. On top of this, they deliver near-perfect color accuracy.

If you already own an OLED TV and you like it, you shouldn’t be in a rush to buy a tandem OLED product.

The real catch at the moment is price. Both formats are so new and expensive that if you can even find a set, it’s liable to cost you tens of thousands of dollars — Samsung’s 115-inch micro RGB set is $30,000. It’s going to take smaller sizes and mass production to bring prices down to reasonable levels.

If you already own a WOLED TV and you like it, then, you shouldn’t be in a rush to buy a tandem OLED product. A little patience could land you something better, assuming those manufacturing hurdles are overcome.