Primary RGB Tandem OLED TV tech explained: how it works, why it’s better than MLA and how it compares with QD-OLED

It’s amazing what a bit of competition can do. After an age of OLED TVs mostly just nudging forward year on year with a few nits of extra brightness here and a bit more colour there, the arrival of Samsung’s QD-OLED technology three years ago has inspired a veritable stampede of OLED innovation as LG Display looks to fend off competition for its traditional WOLED approach.

For 2025, this rivalry has led LG Display, which supplies the vast majority of OLED TV panels in the market (and is distinct to LG Electronics, which produces actual TVs such as the new C5 and G5), to create a new OLED panel technology inelegantly named Primary RGB Tandem which, on paper at least, doesn’t so much rewrite the OLED brightness rule book as rip it up and throw it in the bin.

TVs featuring the new panel tech, including the aforementioned LG G5 and Panasonic Z95B, are now available and are going head-to-head with their Samsung S95F and Sony Bravia 8 II QD-OLED rivals.

So just what is Primary RGB Tandem OLED? And are the TVs that feature it any good?

What exactly is a Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel?

The traditional core OLED panels previously produced by LG Display for more than a decade have created colour by using two blue light-emitting layers sandwiching a third layer that combines the other red, green and yellow colours required to create a colour picture.

For 2023 and 2024, LG Display responded to the high brightness being achieved by Samsung’s rival QD-OLED panels with something called MLA (Micro Lens Array) OLED, which saw an array of tiny lenses being added to the panel structure that could focus more light directly out of the screen.

With QD-OLED continuing to push brightness forward for 2025, though, LG Display has responded again. And this time the solution has been to remove the lens array but introduce a new four-layer design where individual red and green layers are each illuminated by separate blue ‘emissive’ layers.

How much difference can Primary RGB Tandem OLED panels make?

LG Display suggests that ‘four-stack’ Primary RGB Tandem OLED panels are technically capable of hitting peak brightness levels of up to 4000 nits. That would represent a brightness increase of around a third over last year’s OLED panels – a remarkable leap for a single OLED generation that looks even more remarkable given that it comes on top of the also-revolutionary brightness leap provided by the previous Micro Lens Array approach.

We tend not to get too bogged down in brightness measurements, preferring real-world testing, but it's fair to say that the LG G5 and Panasonic Z95B proved to be clearly, significantly brighter than their respective predecessors when we reviewed them.

The biggest gains are in small, super-bright highlights on black backgrounds, with such high-contrast images reportedly going around 1000 nits brighter than before, even in the most cinematically accurate Filmmaker Mode.

With mixed brightness content, the upgrade is less striking, but it is there.

This additional brightness 'headroom' can also be useful if you want to boost the TV's light output to combat bright ambient light in the room.

The other brand getting in on the Primary RGB Tandem OLED action is Philips. We're yet to review its new OLED950 and OLED910 TVs, both of which use the new four-stack technology, but Philips claims they can deliver peak brightness levels of 3700 nits – up from the 3000 nits achieved by the brand’s previous flagship OLEDs.

Philips also claims its new four-stack OLEDs can hit full-screen brightness levels of 350 nits, up from 300 nits previously.

The new Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel design not only produces significantly more brightness than previous LG Display panels, but also enables that extra brightness to be produced more efficiently. In fact, LG Display states that the 65-inch version of its new screen design is as much as 20 per cent more power-efficient than the equivalent 2024 panel.

While staying in the ‘nits race’ by pushing for ever more high dynamic range-friendly brightness is important, given that there’s a brightness-toting rival in town, adding more brightness can bring potential dangers such as raised black levels and washed-out colours.

OLED’s self-emissive nature, though, where each pixel makes its own light, means that the new four-stack Primary RGB Tandem panels shouldn’t have any negative impact on OLED’s renowned black-level prowess.

That said, the LG G5 did ship with some black level issues, where we saw some very unpleasant near-black posterisation, particularly with streamed Dolby Vision content. These issues have been fixed, but a little shadow detail appears to have been lost in the process.

As for colours, LG Display claims that its new panel design actually improves colour purity and range response, upping coverage of the so-called DCI-P3 colour gamut used for most HDR mastering from 98.5% to 99.5%, while coverage of the much wider Rec.2020 spectrum is now reported to be as high as 82-83% – which is essentially on a par with QD OLED.

Are there any downsides to Primary RGB Tandem OLED technology?

Downsides are thankfully few and far between, but Primary RGB Tandem OLED does appear to have an inherent issue with near-black shades, as mentioned above.

While the G5's early, obvious, near-black posterisation issues have been fixed, and were never present on the Panasonic Z95B, both TVs lose a little shadow details when compared with the Sony Bravia 8 II QD-OLED.

Our reviews also suggest that, despite the figures quoted, QD-OLED has the upper hand when it comes to colour vibrancy and consistency, though this is marginal.

Which TVs feature Primary RGB Tandem OLED panels?

As mentioned at the start, LG Display doesn’t sell TVs directly. Instead, it creates the core panels that go into the TVs of various consumer electronics brands.

At the time of writing, three TV brands have announced and released models that feature Primary RGB Tandem panels: LG Electronics, Panasonic and Philips.

In LG Electronic’s case, the new panels are found in its G5 and M5 OLED ranges. Specifically, the 55-, 65-, 77- and 83-inch sizes of the G5, and the M5 series’ 65-, 77- and 83-inch models. Both series use a new Alpha 11 processor to optimise the new panel’s performance.

Panasonic’s flagship Z95B TV range offers the new panels across all three of its 55-, 65- and 77-inch sizes – an improvement on the Z95A range, where only the 55- and 65-inch screens in the range benefited from the then state-of-the-art MLA technology.

The Z95Bs also exclusively partner the new four-stack panels with a proprietary cooling solution called ThermaFlow to help dissipate the heat that can potentially cause permanent image retention issues.

Philips (Europe), meanwhile, is using Primary RGB Tandem panels in its premium OLED950 and OLED910 ranges. The OLED910 is available in 55-, 65- and 77-inch screen sizes, while the OLED950, with its more powerful two-chip processing engines, will ship in 65- and 77-inch sizes.

MORE:

Check out our reviews of the LG G5 and Panasonic Z95B Primary RGB Tandem OLED TVs

And here's our review of the rival Sony Bravia 8 II QD-OLED TV

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