The prettiest OLED displays seem to be getting less expensive every year, and it’s looking like we may finally see it take the crown from LED as the “cheap” screen option. In conjunction with “Inkjet Printed” OLED panels, screenmaker LG claims it has new tech that doesn’t just make the contrast-filled screens easier and cheaper to make; they’re also straight-up better.
LG calls this tech “FLiPP,” an acronym for “FMM-less Innovative Pixel Patterning.” Organic light-emitting diode screens make use of one or more layers of self-emissive red, green, and blue lights without the need for a backlight. This allows for near-infinite contrast and those “inky” blacks you’ve seen people rave about for the last few years. But making these organic diodes work on a substrate is a complex and laborious process.
Companies like LG and Samsung have long relied on a so-called “fine metal mask” (FMM) that essentially acts as a stencil for placing each individual organic substrate. This process is technical, expensive, and extremely wasteful, since you lose much of the organic material during the manufacturing process. It requires an FMM for all these different panel sizes, which is why you find many companies only offering the same scale of screen for both TVs and monitors.
“One of FLiPP’s greatest advantages is that it is free from panel size and resolution constraints,” the company wrote in its press release. “In theory, it can be used to produce displays ranging from 1 inch to 100 inches and can be applied not only to conventional panels but also to VR and AR displays.”
LG says FLiPP uses UV light to evaporate organic materials along the whole substrate with a high level of precision. That supposedly means the pixel patterning process is even more precise than with an FMM. The screenmaker says this allows for screens that are 1.6X brighter with 13% less power consumption. LG further promises these next-gen OLED displays will last more than twice as long as previous displays.
TCL CSOT has promised similar “Inkjet Printing” technology for developing its own cheaper OLEDs, though the company has not offered the same kind of technical walkthrough that LG has. The more important thing for consumers is the promise of cheaper, longer-lasting OLED screens. A typical LED screen is meant to last more years than OLED, but this new technology may finally grant these contrast-filled displays a lifespan of more than 8 to 16 years.
LG is showcasing this new display-making tech for the first time at the International Meeting on Information Display 2026 conference in Busan, South Korea. We shouldn’t expect every new OLED to make use of this technology, though we’ve already seen companies like MSI and Lenovo revealing monitors and laptops sporting the inkjet-printed screens. We expect to see even more of these in the near future.
The main benefit to all this talk is cost. OLED is still considered an expensive option, but it doesn’t need to be. Alienware recently debuted a $350 QD-OLED gaming monitor with limited brightness specs, but we may see even cheaper displays soon. Everything else is getting more expensive, so it’s nice to see at least one technology becoming more affordable.
Read the full article here
