With this year’s CES dominated by high-end RGB Mini LED, Super QLED, and ever-brighter OLED TVs, one super-important TV-related story didn’t get the traction I think it deserved.
That story is that 2026 could be the year that genuinely affordable OLED TVs become available.
The reason very few people seemed to clock this story might be because it wasn’t attached to a specific TV model, but instead came from LG Display, the manufacturer that produces all of the W-OLED panels currently used in TVs.
As What Hi-Fi? Staff Writer Lewis Empson discovered when he met the company at the show, LG Display has developed a new OLED SE panel that should drastically reduce OLED TV prices while actually improving the performance in at least one crucial area.
As LG Display explained to Lewis, the majority of the cost saving has been made by removing the pricey polariser.
Without this, new OLED SE TVs (the SE stands for ‘Special Edition’) will likely be more reflective than current OLED models, but they should also be brighter than current budget sets, hitting something in the region of 1000 nits rather than the 600-700 nits of models such as the LG B5.
None of that is new news, though. What is new is that, according to FlatpanelsHD, LG Display will begin the mass production of these OLED SE panels in February – that’s next month!
LG Display has no control over which models the TV makers use its panels for, but it did tell Lewis at CES that it expects LG Electronics to feature this panel technology in future iterations of the B-series.
It now seems highly likely that those future iterations will include this year’s LG B6. And that might also help explain why the B6 was missing from LG Electronics’ stand at CES – the panels just weren’t ready in time.
If the B6 does indeed get the new OLED SE panel, it could be a substantial upgrade over the preceding B5 – and significantly cheaper, too.
That last point would be particularly helpful. The price gap between LG’s C- and B-series OLEDs hasn’t been big enough in recent years, and the world is crying out for genuinely affordable OLED TVs.
Perhaps this is the year we finally get them.
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Check out our LG C6 hands-on and LG G6 hands-on
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