Today, almost every affordable headset uses LCD panels, while premium options use micro-OLED, technically known as OLED-on-silicon (OLEDoS).
LCD is cheap, but has poor contrast, forming a relatively washed-out image that compresses the darkest details into a gray haze in place of deep blacks. Meanwhile micro-OLED offers vibrant colors with rich contrast, and can achieve extremely high resolution without increasing the bulk of headsets, but is incredibly difficult to manufacture and thus very expensive.
Some headsets like Meta Quest Pro, the Pimax Crystal series, and Somnium VR1 use advanced LCD panels with an array of mini backlights to improve contrast compared to regular LCD, and a quantum dot layer to enhance colors, but the result is still a far cry from the self-emissive nature of OLED, where every pixel provides its own light. Further, the extra layers increase thickness, weight, heat, and power draw.
TCL’s new OLED panel could power clear and sharp headsets with rich colors, deep contrast, and true blacks, but without the sky-high prices you get with micro-OLED. And this could be key to delivering compelling products that sit somewhere between Meta Quest 3 and Samsung Galaxy XR in the market.
Interesting to see where this leads, but I’m not terribly excited about this yet. The article mentions, but doesn’t necessarily explain, how these are supposed to work with pancake lens assemblies — only that they propose that they are. One of the major problems with those is light loss, which is the stated reason Valve went with LCD rather than OLED for the Steam Frame. LCD brightness can be fairly trivially increased simply by… well, making the backlight brighter. LEDs, on the other hand, largely provide their luminance as a function of the surface area of the die. If you make them smaller it also makes 'em dimmer, and there isn’t any mention of whether or not TCL has somehow managed to overcome this. That may explain the rather underwhelming bump in panel resolution.
Option B is just to drive them harder, which is probably not a great plan for an OLED panel’s already finite lifetime. The blue subpixels die first, then the greens, then the reds…