WOLED White OLED with color filters

Panel architecture

WOLED stands for White OLED. The architecture stacks a white-light OLED emitter beneath a color-filter array. Each pixel contains 4 sub-pixels: filtered red, filtered green, filtered blue, and an unfiltered white sub-pixel.

The unfiltered white sub-pixel bypasses the color-filter loss and raises overall panel brightness. The trade-off is reduced color purity in highlights, since the filters discard a fixed percentage of the white emitter's output and cannot match the saturation of additive-color RGB sub-pixel architectures at high luminance.

Manufacturer and brand scope

LG Display is the sole manufacturer of WOLED TV panels — Samsung Display does not produce WOLED. LG Display supplies WOLED panels to LG Electronics, Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Loewe, JVC, Hisense, and Konka, in sizes ranging from 42 inches to 97 inches.

On volume, LG Display shipped 6 million WOLED TV panels in 2025 and targets 7 million in 2026.

Panel generations

MLA WOLED, introduced on the LG G3 in 2023, added a Micro Lens Array layer above the OLED stack to redirect oblique-angle emission toward the viewer. The chemistry was unchanged; the optical layer simply redistributed existing light, raising panel-level peak brightness without altering the underlying emitter.

Primary RGB Tandem WOLED, introduced on the LG G5 in 2025, replaced the single-stack white emitter with a two-layer Tandem stack of RGB OLED emitters — a chemistry change rather than an optical one. TechRadar measured the LG G5 at 2,268 nits peak HDR on a 10% window in Filmmaker mode.

LG Display's 2026 4th-generation WOLED, branded Primary RGB Tandem 2.0, carries a manufacturer-claimed peak brightness of 4,500 nits at the panel level — a maximum-capability claim from LG Display, not a TV-level measurement. On the LG G6 (2026, Primary RGB Tandem 2.0), independent reviewers measured roughly 2,300 nits (AVForums) to 2,471 nits (TechRadar) peak HDR on a 10% window in Filmmaker mode.

WOLED vs QD-OLED

WOLED and QD-OLED differ in how they generate color. QD-OLED uses a blue OLED emitter combined with quantum-dot color-conversion films for red and green sub-pixels, while WOLED uses a white OLED emitter passed through RGB color filters plus an unfiltered white sub-pixel.

The two architectures come from different display vendors: WOLED is manufactured exclusively by LG Display, and QD-OLED is manufactured exclusively by Samsung Display. Neither company produces the other architecture.