Samsung explains the new tech that's making its 2026 flagship OLED TV so much brighter — and promises the screen should last twice as long, too

• QD-OLED Penta Tandem is name of Samsung's next-gen OLED panel
• Already in the 2026 Samsung S95H TV, and coming to monitors
• 1.3x brighter and claimed to last 2x longer than current panels

Samsung's flagship OLED TV for 2026, the Samsung S95H, promises to be 30% brighter than the previous year's S95F – and now Samsung has gone into detail about how it's achieved that.

The brightness boost is likely to generate the most headlines, but there's another very welcome development here: Samsung's new panels should last almost twice as long, according the to the company.

New tech means new branding, and this is no exception: say hello to QD-OLED Penta Tandem™. And the use of Penta – the Greek word for the number five – shows Samsung Display taking the same approach to light-emitting layers that Gillette does to razor blades: it's upped the number of blue light-emitting layers from four to five. And that delivers some important benefits.

How Samsung gave its QD-OLED a brightness boost

The blue emitting layer is the light source for Samsung's QD-OLED, and by upping the layers from four to five and using "the latest organic materials" Samsung Display has been able to deliver increased brightness and energy efficiency.

Here's Samsung Display's explanation: "When the number of organic material layers increases, luminous efficiency improves, enabling higher brightness at the same power level or maintaining the same brightness with lower power consumption. It is similar to five people carrying a load that was previously carried by four, allowing either greater endurance or the ability to lift something heavier."

It also looks like a newer and more advanced kind of quantum dot may be used in the panel, which can also help brightness and efficiency, though Samsung didn't address this in its unveiling of the Penta Tandem tech.

What that means in practice is that the new five-layer structure delivers 1.3x the brightness and double the product lifespan compared to last year's four-layer QD-OLEDs. That means theoretical peak brightness of up to 4,500 nits in TVs, and 1,300 nits for monitors – though you shouldn't expect real-world figures that match this, particularly in the case of TVs.

30% brighter than the Samsung S95F flagship OLED from last year will actually mean a peak brightness of around 2,750 nits in practice, based on our measurements of the previous model. But that will still be pretty amazing for an OLED TV, to be clear!

Samsung Display supplies panels to a range of manufacturers, not just Samsung, and it intends to expand its range of QD-OLED Penta Tandem panels across the full range of panel sizes during 2026 including a 49-inch dual QHD (5,120 x 1,440) monitor and multiple TVs.

This is a significant upgrade, and it'll be interesting to see how it compares to last year's panels: we anointed the Samsung S95F as our TV of the year in 2025 and it remains one of our picks for the best TVs in 2026.

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