Sept. 7, 2026

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You're in an electronics store with $1,500 to spend. On your left, a 65-inch LG OLED with blacks so deep they seem to swallow light. On your right, a 75-inch TCL mini-LED that is 10 inches bigger and impossible to ignore.

Increasingly, people are picking the bigger screen.

Mini-LED shipments and revenue have overtaken OLED in the super-premium TV segment in recent years, according to Counterpoint Research, with shipments of 75-inch-plus premium sets surging 79 percent year-on-year in early 2025. "Consumers face a choice between a smaller OLED TV or a larger mini-LED TV," said Counterpoint Research Director Bob O'Brien. "And an increasing number of consumers are choosing mini-LEDs."

LG's response arrives later this year: the SE (Special Edition) OLED, a panel designed to pull OLED pricing closer to mini-LED territory. But by LG's own admission, this is not about making OLED a mass-market product. It is about whether the price gap can shrink enough for the quality difference to tip the decision.

At a March 25 product event in Seoul, Baek Seon-pil, head of display customer experience at LG Electronics, was disarmingly frank. Some 200 million TVs sell globally each year, he noted, but OLED production capacity sits under 10 million units. OLED, he said, is "like a Lexus: no longer impossibly expensive, but never truly cheap."

Asked about the SE panel, which LG Display had officially unveiled earlier that month as its first budget-oriented OLED without pricing details, Baek attributed its cost savings not to a downgrade in image quality, but "improved power efficiency and thermal management" that "reduces the need for expensive heat-dissipation materials."

Moon Dae-gyu, a display engineering professor at Soonchunhyang University and a former LG Display researcher, translated that more bluntly: "LG's explanation essentially means they're lowering the brightness." Drive pixels less hard, they generate less heat, and you can strip out costly aluminum heat sinks and thermal sheets.

"Especially for larger panels, where thermal materials get expensive, the savings could be significant," Moon told The Korea Herald.

Industry sources add that LG Display has also removed the polarizer, a film that blocks ambient light reflections but absorbs roughly half the panel's own light in the process. Stripping it out lets the panel hit its brightness targets with far less power, but the trade-off is glaring: SE's reflectance sits at roughly 4 percent, on par with most mini-LED sets but noticeably above the sub-2-percent levels of LG's own polarizer-equipped C-series OLEDs.

Combined with the brightness cap of around 1,000 nits, these changes could reportedly cut SE panel costs by over 20 percent.

Baek from LG also insisted SE preserves OLED's core experience, and on the fundamentals, that holds. Pitch-perfect blacks, wide viewing angles, instant motion response: These are inherent to self-emitting pixels and survive regardless of price tier. "As long as it's OLED, they're there," said Han Chang-wook, vice president at UBI Research and a former OLED TV development executive at LG Display.

Professor Moon added that the reported brightness of 1,000 nits is more than adequate for typical home viewing. He pointed out that even retail showroom TVs rarely run at higher brightness to avoid panel degradation.

"At that brightness, with a reported reflectance of around 4 percent, there's no issue for normal use," he said.

But adequate for use and competitive in a market are different things. An industry official, speaking anonymously, offered a sharper view. Lower peak brightness is OLED's long-standing weak point against LCD-based rivals, and LG has spent years closing that gap, pushing flagships from 1,500 nits to over 3,000 this year. “An SE model that visibly reverses that progress could undercut its own pitch,” he said.

The pricing gap with mini-LED TV sets is ultimately where SE's bet comes into focus. Han from UBI laid out a straightforward calculation: LG's 2025 C5, a 65-inch OLED, already retails for around $1,300 in the US after discounts. A 2026 model built on the cheaper SE panel could launch near that price, within arm's reach of premium Chinese mini-LED sets like TCL's QM8 or Hisense's U8.

On that basis, Han estimates the OLED-to-mini-LED price premium "could fall from today's 30 to 50 percent to as low as 10 percent."

Whether SE's advantage holds also depends on forces beyond LG's control. A TCL-Sony joint venture expected next year could further sharpen mini-LED's appeal by pairing Chinese manufacturing scale with Sony's image-processing expertise. Chinese manufacturers have a long history of absorbing losses to protect market share. "That isn't hypothetical," Han said. "We've seen it plenty of times."

By Moon Joon-hyun (mjh@heraldcorp.com)