Display Week Sees New 8K Developments in LCD and OLED
The SID Display Week (DW 2025) is a fascinating blend of the academic and the commercial. As well as scientists, academics and engineers and researchers, there is an exhibition full of sales and marketing people. There’s a well established Business Conference that takes a full day (although this time it was split over two ‘half days’ partly to avoid the need for speakers and delegates to travel on Mothers’ Day!
Of course, one of the over-riding themes of the conference was the current tariff situation. It was clear, though, that for the moment, there is not a big impact on the TV market in the US because TVs for the US are already largely made in Mexico and there are special arrangements for TV imports from Mexico. The TV market is pretty stable, having gotten past the Covid hangover, when the market went through a big ‘boom and bust’ cycle. During the pandemic, many consumers bought new TVs, but then didn’t need to buy them afterwards. Things have settled back down now.
US Consumers Like Big TVs
US consumers, in particular, love large TVs and that is helping LCD TV sales. Because OLED TV panels and TVs cost so much more to make than LCDs, a consumer with a fixed amount of budget has to make a choice between a smaller OLED or a larger miniLED TV. Most are choosing to buy bigger sets, so in the ‘Advanced TV’ segment, miniLED LCD TVs are out-selling OLEDs and from a business point of view, OLEDs from LG and QD-OLEDs from Samsung are not doing so well. As Bob O’Brien of Counterpoint Research (the company that runs the Business Conference) said, “OLEDs have been a technical success, but a business failure”.
For LCD, then, the outlook is quite positive and that should be good for great 8K miniLED TVs.
New 8K Products
In the exhibition area, there were a number of 8K demonstrations. Display Week demonstrations are often of technologies that are not yet ready for mass production, and need building into finished products, but it’s interesting to see the technical trends.
At last year’s event, the CEO of TCL/CSOT, the panel making division of the TCL TV company, talked about the firm’s plans to develop inkjet printing (IJP) of OLEDs. As well as its own research, the firm got technology when it bought JOLED, a Japanese company that had developed some inkjet printed OLED displays. At DW 2025, the firm showed a very good looking 65” TV panel with 8K resolution and created with IJP. There are plans to develop production of smaller panels first as the production line that is being used has a very limited capacity. Still, the firm believes that using IJP to create OLEDs could be 20% cheaper than the method used by LG.
Another TV LCD on the TCL/CSOT booth was a 98” unit that uses RGB backlights. We have previously written about the rationale for this technology, so we won’t repeat it here, but it is likely to be a trend at the high end of the miniLED TV market from 2026, we think. It will be at the high end of the market as it is likely to add cost, but it will reduce power consumption As well as boosting LCD color performance and those are both significant advantages.
TCL/CSOT was highlighting another panel that it has developed that it claims as the first 85” panel that can be used to gain an EU ‘A’ grade power rating. The aperture ratio (the percentage of the backlight emission that comes out of the front of the set) is around 7.5% – up from a typical value of around 5%, they told us. Although this panel (and the 98”) were just 4K, the trends to RGB backlights and better aperture ratios are both technical trends that can help 8K to develop.
Making Even Bigger LCD TVs
The company had an unusual 9:8 aspect ratio display that was showing fine art and might be used in a gallery. The panel was 4320 x 3840 and with an 85” diagonal. Inside the booth, there was a demonstration of two of the panels ‘spliced together’ to create a single huge LCD. Normally, this would mean a visible black line down the center of the display, but at the show, a strip of transparent material, embedded with miniLEDs was shown that was showing from the original image and concealing the gap. From a distance and with the right content, the join was barely visible. The writer first saw this kind of technology from a company called Pallas LCD back in 2013 and it wouldn’t surprise us if this technology was developed by or with that firm, although the last activity we could find on the web by Pallas was from İSE in 2018.
One of the challenges with making really big (over 100”) LCDs is to drive them accurately. To get the right colour at a particular point on the display, you have to get the right voltage to that point. Getting the right voltage at high frequency over a long transparent electrode is a real challenge. TCL/CSOT got around this on the tiled display by rotating the displays so each was driven from the outer edge to the center.
Finally, we looked at a new version of the 57” curved gaming panel that the firm is supplying to be made into gaming monitors. The horizontal resolution is 8K, but the vertical is just 2K, so it might better be thought of as ‘dual UHD’. Nevertheless, the wide resolution brings the feeling of immersion that is one of the advantages of 8K. The new version of the panel was being driven at 1,000 Hz, which should be enough for any gamer!
The Largest Panel Maker Shows 8K Monitor
BOE of China is, these days, the largest panel maker in the world. On its booth was a very good looking 31.5’ 8K LCD monitor panel. It supports up to 120Hz refresh rate in 8K or can run at 240Hz in 4K. The firm told us that it expects some mass production later this year.
BOE also had a number of TV panels and was highlighting the performance of the latest miniLED UB Cell 4.0 ADS Pro panels which approach the level of image quality of OLEDs. Another demonstration was of an 85” 4K panel that used an RGB backlight and was running in a frame sequential mode. In this mode, the RGB backlights are synchronized to follow an RGB sequence and the color filter is eliminated. As well as eliminating the filter, which makes the panel much more efficient, the technology means that there are only a third of the number of transistors as there is no need for RGB sub-pixels. For 8K, this could be a great advantage in helping to reduce complexity, cost and power consumption. However, this was only a technology demonstration, so it is unclear that the panel will go into production.
BOE also showed a stereo 3D monitor using eye-tracking that impressed with its quality. Objects could only be shown in front of the display surface, but the images were very good and supported vertical parallax adjustment. Staff on the booth told us that the base panel was a 16K development.
SEL Surprises with Wonderful 8K Prototype
Semiconductor Energy Laboratories (SEL) is a Japanese research company that specialises in developing semiconductors and has been a key technology partner for Japanese companies such as Sharp in helping to develop backplane technologies including amorphous silicon TFTs and oxide backplanes as well as LTPS. At DW 2025, the firm surprised us by showing a prototype that it had developed of an 8.3” diagonal 8K display with a resolution of more than 1,000ppi. That’s the highest resolution direct view LCD that this writer has ever seen. Projection LCDs have more than that, but they are monochrome, while the SEL demo was full color. The display was showing native 8K content and had such great quality that it looked genuinely 3D in many scenes.
There was no information on whether such a product would ever come to market, but SEL told us that the backplane was created using annealed oxide – that is to say an oxide backplane that had been treated like an LTPS display. The backplane technology is not likely to be simple or cheap but could represent the next generation of flat panel backplanes of the highest performance. We’re planning a deeper dive on this development.
VESA & Sumitomo Extending DisplayPort Cables
Both VESA, the standards body and Sumitomo, the cable maker, were at the show with booths. VESA was promoting a number of its technologies including DP80LL (long length?). This is a new VESA initiative to add active electronics (a linear re-driver) to a DisplayPort cable to enable the full 80 Gbps bandwidth to 3 or 3.5 meters (still tbd). Without the boost, cables should be kept under 1M. Sumitomo was showing that it has cables ready for the new specification.
Finally, with the topic of miniLED and RGB backlights being an important one, we were interested to see a new concept from Smartkem. The company makes organic semiconductor materials and has developed a system to create 2 x 2 arrays of microLEDs that are individually or serially addressable and that are then in a configuration that can be put in a standard pick and place machine. That machine can then be used to create a backlight unit. This could bring the cost advantages of microLED to processes that have been designed for miniLEDs and can fit existing production. They can be used with RGB microLEDs to create RGB backlights.
(Although we saw reports and a press release of a ‘greater than 8K’ near to eye display from Samsung’s eMagin subsidiary, the truth was that although the displays had >5,000 ppi, the resolution, the firm told us, was 5,400 x 4,600. We suspect that the firm could make an 8K display, but it would need a very big chip).
This sounds like such an exciting future, especially for the incoming future of gaming like PS6 as well as Next-gen Xbox! Hopefully they’ll finally support Native 4K+120FPS, with default system tools allowing for those future consoles to provide two different enhancement options: either keep games at 4K in favor of running at 240Hz, or keep their framerate as 120Hz in favor of displaying 8K quality/resolution instead! I also wish that Nintendo Switch 2 OLED could have a screen exactly like SEL’s 8K Prototype (which is diagonally 8.3 inches large), but sadly I guarantee that NS2 OLED won’t have 4320p quality, especially much less on Mobile Mode.