Tandem OLEDs Explained – The Future Of Gaming Monitors?

Tandem OLEDs are likely the future of our gaming monitors, and here’s why. OLEDs in general are seen as the ‘endgame’ of monitors, especially for gaming. Instant response times, theoretically infinite refresh rates, perfect colour recreation, the works. They are amazing, and damn near perfect. They do have two main drawbacks though, those being brightness and lifespan. For some context, a typical (good) gaming monitor can offer 400 to 600 nits of brightness in SDR right out the box. That’s a lot of light – enough to use it with sunlight bursting through your windows. It isn’t enough to use in direct sunlight, for that you want a reflective LCD panel (video in the cards about that one), but it’s enough for indirect, very bright, light. OLEDs though, they can’t do anywhere near that much. My Philips EVNIA 8600 QD-OLED can offer just 250 nits of peak SDR brightness, and W-OLEDs generally offer about the same across the full screen. As for lifespan, most LCD monitors will happily last a decade, with (in my experience anyway) the electronics like the power supply or controller board being the thing that actually fails, well before the panel itself. OLEDs? Well they come with three year warranties at most, and thanks to burn-in, when you are talking over a decade anyway, that will affect these panels long term, even if my QD-OLED still doesn’t have any issue over two years into using it every day. Add a few more years and it will have some, and it’s unlikely to last a decade without having some serious burn-in, potentially rendering it unusable. 

It turns out though that both of those issues are really the same problem, which is that the more brightness you want out of an LED – like the millions that make up an organic light emitting display – the more power you need to ram through them, and the more power, the more heat. The more heat, the more you damage that LED – and the important thing to know is that it isn’t a linear one-to-one relationship. LEDs have an efficiency curve, where it takes exponentially more power to get the same steps up in brightness. That is why OLEDs don’t run all that bright – it’s not that they can’t, it’s that they’d be a black hole for power AND they’d die in weeks, not years. 

Tandem OLEDs though, well they promise to solve both of those problems with a rather ingenious trick – use multiple layers in tandem, hence the name. This Asus monitor uses an LG panel, since LG is the only tandem OLED panel manufacturer, and this version uses four total OLED layers stacked together to offer a purported 15 percent more brightness and a whopping 60 percent longer lifespan. It’s worth noting by the way that there are really only two OLED panel manufacturers – LG and Samsung – because the process to make OLED panels is utterly insane. The machines needed to make OLED panels are building sized, and Canon’s one is over 100 metres long! It’s made in a total vacuum to deposit the organic material that makes up the OLEDs, using microscopic masks to deposit them in the right place. Anyway, stacking OLED panels together gives you a very key advantage, which brings us back to the efficiency curve. The more layers you have, the less power you need to pump into each of them to get the same light output, and thanks to being much lower on the efficiency curve, you need considerably less power, which means less heat, and less damage to the pixels. 

It’s also worth mentioning that the new tandem stack is specifically red, blue, green, blue, rather than blue, yellow, blue, which means each stack can output exclusively blue, green or red light, meaning you don’t need to add colour filters over the top like the third gen OLEDs, which improves colour reproduction and efficiency since you aren’t blocking some of the light being generated. Neat! Something I didn’t realise until writing this video is that stacking is actually a pretty core concept with OLEDs – WOLED or not. QD-OLEDs are actually stacked too, with a blue emissive layer at the bottom, and then a quantum dot layer stacked on top – that’s what gives you the colour output. 

So, by stacking more layers, you get more brightness, less burn-in, AND more colours? What’s not to love? Well, the big catch at least for the moment is that we still aren’t quite at good LCD levels of brightness – while this Asus monitor can do over 500 nits at peak, that’s only with one ninth of the screen lit. Light up half and it’s just 340 nits, which is more than enough for basically everyone, but it isn’t quite matching LCDs yet. Burn in is also a (long term) problem. Asus claims this has a 60 percent longer lifespan, but 60 percent more than two years is still only three and a bit years, not the decade or more most people keep their monitors for. I mean hell I still use my AOC G2460PQU, a monitor I reviewed at the start of 2015, so going on 11 years old at this point, but I can’t imagine my EVNIA 8600 will still be alive and well in 2034. Still, this fourth generation of WOLED is a pretty big improvement, and we are clearly moving in the right direction to making OLEDs the go-to for gaming monitors. I am so happy with my QD-OLED – I wouldn’t give it up for anything – and I hope that these keep getting better, and coming down in price, so everyone can get their hands on these frankly amazing bits of kit.