By Alex Jensen
You don’t have to look very hard to find forecasts suggesting this year’s economic challenges will roll into 2025. However, there are reasons to be cheerful – at least where the display industry’s concerned.
In particular, I’ve picked some highlights from 2024 that point to optimism in certain areas of the industry. From OLED’s smaller “smart” screen renaissance to one of the biggest “wow” form factors we’ve seen in years, let’s take a closer look at some eye-catching developments from the past 12 months.
Putting the Tandem in IT
A flurry of recent headlines have celebrated how small and medium-sized OLED display shipments are set to hit a billion units next year, citing data from global technology analyst Omdia. That’s a lot of panels, and there’s a lot to unpack there, but we are witnessing a boom period for OLED panels in terms of smartphone, tablet, and laptop applications.
In fact, 2024 will be seen as a tipping point for premium IT and mobile device panels, with particularly bright future unfolding for Tandem OLED panels, which have drawn attention this year for their tablet and laptop applications.
Tandem OLED was first commercialized by LG Display in 2019 on the basis that two OLED layers stacked together achieve superior durability, performance, and energy efficiency than a regular single-layer display. For instance, LG Display’s latest Tandem OLED panel offers double the lifespan, triple the brightness, and up to 40% less power consumption than a single-layer counterpart. Such benefits initially found their application in the Automotive OLED sector, but just as importantly as we accelerate into the era of AI, many more devices need to be as energy efficient as possible to handle greater processing capabilities.
As a result, Omdia has listed OLED “mobile PC/tablet” panel shipments jumping from less than 7.9 million units last year to nearly 26.1 million in 2024. While OLED smartphone panel shipments continue to rise at the expense of LCD alternatives, the laptop and tablet market has suddenly emerged as a “second smartphone” opportunity for Tandem OLED, being considered the “next big thing” by the Korean display industry as it has a comparative advantage over rivals in China, where Tandem OLED production is yet to take off. According to Korean media citing Omdia, Tandem OLED shipments are expected to increase from 8.1 million units this year to 71.81 million in 2031.
Automotive displays also remain a key growth engine for Tandem OLED as LG Display has this year focused on exhibiting solutions optimized for SDVs, or software defined vehicles. Over the past 12 months, the company demonstrated the world’s largest automotive display, a 57-inch Pillar-to-Pillar LCD, as well as an unprecedented 32-inch Slidable OLED. Such innovations are already transforming the automotive display landscape, but I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of the third-generation Tandem OLED panels for automobiles that industry sources anticipate to enter mass production from 2026 – offering further improved brightness and power consumption.
Bigger screens are back?
All that said, we should not overlook the larger size OLED TV and Gaming OLED markets. While the OLED TV market is more mature than Tandem OLED, for instance, we still saw room for impressive growth in 2024. OLED TV panel shipments are expected to reach around 7.1 million units this year, up from less than 5.3 million in 2023 – again, based on Omdia research. Of course, there was a rebound effect in play following the previous year’s decline – but we can point to positive factors reviving the large-sized TV market, such as sports fans wanting to feast their eyes on those major football and Olympic events over the summer in Germany and France, respectively. Also worth noting, OLED’s share of the global premium TV market is up to 47% from 35% last year. In addition, I noticed how “OLED monitors emerged suddenly as the preferred display for high-end gamers, who appreciated the fast response time, high contrast ratio, and thin form factor.”
Aside from external factors like sports events, LG Display has done a lot this year to encourage demand in this area. The company unveiled its latest generation of large-sized OLED panels at the start of 2024, which “blow away Mini-LED TVs” thanks to META Technology 2.0. By equipping both TV and Gaming OLED panels with META Technology 2.0, they get a brightness boost of over 40% compared with conventional OLEDs. Among other highlights, this year saw LG Display unveil the first OLED display with a 480Hz refresh rate, delivering an exceptionally smooth gaming experience, not to mention the first Gaming OLED panel with a switchable refresh rate and resolution.
There was further good news – and therefore encouragement to enjoy OLED – from the finding that “watching TV before bed isn’t great, but it’s okay if you have an OLED.” Relevant to both TV viewers and gamers, they benefit from relatively low blue light emitted by OLED panels. This “human-friendliness” was underscored in October when LG Display announced that its entire lineup of OLED TV and monitor panels had become the world’s first displays to receive Eyesafe Circadian Certification.
When cutting-edge tech meets avant-garde fashion
Perhaps one of the display stories that gained the most mainstream media traction in 2024 was the sight of models walking down a Seoul Fashion Week runway wearing screens. The headline, “This tech company thinks we’ll be wearing screens one day”might imply that this was just LG Display’s vision, but leading fashion designers were also getting excited about the potential applications for a new kind of material that can change color or pattern at will.
The implications for Stretchable displays go further, however. The screens that appeared at 2025 S/S Seoul Fashion Week were based on a 2022 prototype capable of extending from 12 to 14 inches while maintaining a high resolution of 100ppi and a full color spectrum. A couple of months after that Seoul Fashion Week, LG Display unveiled the world’s first Stretchable display that can expand up to 50%, from 12 to 18 inches – and still maintaining that high resolution of 100ppi and full red, green, and blue color.
So, for the world at large – the question is, what should we do with Stretchable displays that may be stretched, folded, and twisted into just about any shape as desired? Aside from asking fashion designers, this may interest wearable, mobility, and various other industries. For example, LG Display has developed an automotive panel concept that stretches into a convex shape as well as another wearable display that provides real-time information when attached to a firefighter’s uniform.
Speaking of next-generation displays, and coming full circle back to that small and medium-sized category, we should also keep an eye on OLEDoS for VR and smartwatches, which LG Display unveiled at SID Display Week 2024. These relatively tiny 1.3-inch panels are pretty incredible with features such as 10,000 nits of brightness and 4K resolution. With OLED panel shipments for smartwatches, for instance, jumping 16.5% this year after a stagnant 2022-2023, OLEDoS is advancing to offer exceptional picture quality along with capabilities like glasses-free 3D technology – all on the wrist! As 2025 is now upon us, the future is knocking.
