Ahead of CES 2026, LG Display has just announced a seemingly revolutionary development in the OLED world, at least as far as its own panels are concerned. The company has achieved a striped, true RGB subpixel layout in one of its upcoming monitors — in particular, a 27-inch 4K display with a 240 Hz native refresh rate, doubled by dual-mode capabilities.
To understand why this is such a big deal, we first have to look at how subpixel structures inform the image quality that you see. Every display has pixels, and each of those pixels are made up of tiny red, green, and blue (RGB) subpixels. However, LG's panels also add a fourth white subpixel in the equation to boost brightness.
See, OLED panels are inherently weak when it comes to being bright because driving those sweet organic pixels as hard as possible will wear them out quickly, leading to burn-in. Therefore, you need ingenuity to tackle this issue, and so far, LG has relied on that white subpixel for the most part, but that comes with a downside.
(Image credit: LG Display)
Even though the inherent luminance of the image is boosted, the color volume is hurt as a byproduct of what white subpixel essentially bleeding over the other colors. This is why Samsung's QD-OLED panels are touted for their superior color performance, since they don't have a white subpixel and instead emit blue light that passes through quantum dots to filter colors.
Now, getting rid of that white subpixel and reverting back to a true RGB structure does hurt brightness outright, at least in the first-gen implementation, but it could be a worthwhile tradeoff. That's why LG is quoting just 1,000 nits of peak brightness, with 250 nits full-screen APL, noticeably decreased from the 1,500 nits max their latest Tandem OLED panels can achieve.
That's one part of the equation; the other is that striped layout, which is just as important. Instead of putting the subpixels in a triangular or rectangular structure — or really any other pattern — LG places the red, green and blue subpixels right next to each other in a straight line, forming a "stripe." But, again, they've always had that white subpixel in the middle, creating a RGWB pattern instead.
Therefore, this is the first time a high refresh OLED panel has had a true RGB stripe subpixel layout. This leads to reduced fringing and distortion in text, since the font engines rendering that expect a more conventional layout. LCDs and such have striped subpixel arrangements for ages, but OLEDs have suffered either because of the white subpixel or just a differently shaped layout altogether, such as in QD-OLED panels.
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To be clear, OLEDs with this kind of a layout have existed before, but they're niche and limited to just 60Hz, as LG points out in its own press release, so achieving a 240 Hz refresh rate is quite impressive and nicely brings the tech into the modern day. Keep in mind that LG Display is a separate company from LG. This is just one gaming monitor, so it doesn't represent a broader shift away from WOLED from LG as a whole.
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