OLED displays

The OLED display in the new iPad Pro is a great leap forward

- Cliff Joseph

Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology has only ever been used in a limited way in Apple products, being chiefly found on the iPhone and Apple Watch. That looks set to change. With the new iPad Pro sporting an Ultra Retina XDR display that uses Tandem OLED, you can expect OLED to appear in even more Apple products in future, including Apple computers such as the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. So what is OLED, and what advantages does it offer over the more common LCD and LED display technologies that are in use today?

There’s a lot of jargon involved with display tech, so it’s worth a quick recap. Most displays currently used for computers, tablets, TVs and other devices use LCD technology – which stands for liquid crystal display. These displays sandwich a layer of liquid crystal material between thin glass panels. The liquid crystals can change colour when an electric current is passed through them in order to create the image that we see on screen. There are several different types of LCD available, although the most popular these days is known as IPS – or in-plane switching – so you may often see a display referred to as IPS or IPS-LCD rather than just plain old LCD.

LED and LCD