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South Korea’s two largest display makers arrived at the same conference this week with the same ambition and sharply different solutions. On August 19, 2026, at the 26th International Meeting on Information Display (IMID 2026) at BEXCO in Busan, LG Display and Samsung Display each unveiled world-first OLED technologies — competing demonstrations of where premium display manufacturing is heading in the second half of the decade.
LG Display’s headline reveal was FLiPP (FMM-Less innovative Pixel Patterning), a manufacturing process that forms pixels without metal masks. The Fine Metal Mask is the nickel-alloy stencil that has been the standard method for depositing red, green, and blue OLED subpixels since the technology’s commercial beginnings — and eliminating it is something OLED engineers have described for years as a “dream.” Samsung Display’s answer was the Wide View display, a 7.6-inch foldable panel that delivers consistent foldable brightness uniformly for the first time in a commercially relevant form, solving a problem that has dogged foldable phones since the Galaxy Fold launched in 2019.
The timing of both reveals is pointed. Chinese display makers — TCL CSOT, Visionox, and BOE — are accelerating toward OLED production, and neither Samsung Display nor LG Display can rely on incumbency alone to hold the premium tier. What they can rely on is process depth, and both companies arrived at IMID 2026 to demonstrate that their next-generation process work is real and measurable, not merely announced.
Why the Metal Mask Has Always Been the Ceiling
To understand why FLiPP matters, it helps to understand what the Fine Metal Mask actually is and why no one has been able to get rid of it before. The FMM is a thin sheet of nickel alloy, machined to have thousands of microscopic holes arranged in precise patterns corresponding to the red, green, and blue subpixels of a finished display. During production, this sheet is placed between the heated organic evaporation source and the glass substrate; organic material passes through the holes and lands only where the pixels should be. It works. It has worked at scale for more than two decades. And it has two problems that only get worse as panels get larger.
The first problem is cost. Every time a manufacturer wants to make a panel at a different size or resolution, a new mask must be produced. The masks themselves are expensive precision instruments, and their fabrication is a non-trivial lead time. The second problem is physics. At large substrate sizes — the kind needed to produce TV panels efficiently — a metal mesh sags under its weight during the evaporation process. The sag causes the mask’s holes to drift out of alignment. The result is color mixing between subpixels, which degrades image quality and kills yield. This is the direct reason why OLED TV production has historically been based on a white-OLED-plus-color-filter architecture (WOLED) rather than direct red-green-blue emission: the FMM cannot reliably deposit direct RGB subpixels at Gen 8.5 substrate sizes.
What FLiPP Actually Does
FLiPP replaces the stencil entirely. Instead of evaporating organic material through holes in a metal sheet, FLiPP coats all three subpixel colors across the entire substrate simultaneously, fixes each layer in position, and then uses UV photolithography — the same category of process that has manufactured semiconductor chips for sixty years — to etch away unwanted material precisely in all the locations where it is not supposed to be.
The practical consequences are substantial. Because there is no mask that needs to fit the substrate, a single FLiPP production line can in principle manufacture panels from 1 inch to 100 inches (254 centimeters) without retooling. LG Display demonstrated the process on a Gen 8.5 mother glass substrate — 2,200 × 2,500 mm (approximately 7.2 × 8.2 feet) — processed as a single whole piece rather than divided into halves before patterning, as competing maskless approaches require. That distinction matters for efficiency: processing the full substrate in one run delivers up to 64% higher mother glass utilization compared with making the same panel size using divided substrates.
The aperture ratio — the fraction of each pixel’s total area that actively emits light — improves by approximately 55% compared with conventional FMM production under identical conditions. This translates into a tradeoff the manufacturer can deploy as: brightness up to 1.6 times higher; panel lifespan extended by 2.4 times; or power consumption reduced by 13% — depending on what the application demands. A wearable benefits most from power savings; an automotive display might demand brightness; a TV wants lifespan.
“We were able to successfully realize FLiPP, a next-generation OLED patterning technology referred to as a ‘dream technology,’ by bringing together our proprietary WOLED technologies and know-how,” said Choi Young-seok, CTO at LG Display. The company drew on its accumulated experience manufacturing large-panel Tandem WOLED displays — the architecture behind LG’s current OLED TV lineup — to develop the photolithographic approach, which leverages existing production infrastructure rather than requiring entirely new equipment categories.
What FLiPP Could Mean for OLED TVs
The implications of FLiPP extend further than its efficiency story. The reason OLED TVs today use WOLED — white emission filtered through color filters — rather than direct RGB OLED is precisely because FMMs could not reliably pattern RGB subpixels at Gen 8.5 sizes. Direct RGB OLED, the architecture used in OLED smartphone panels, produces superior color purity and higher efficiency than WOLED because no color filter absorbs a portion of the emitted light. If FLiPP can be scaled to volume production, it represents the first credible path to bringing the panel quality of an OLED smartphone display to a 65-inch (165 cm) TV.
LG Display has indicated it will start commercial deployment with IT applications — tablets and monitors — before expanding to TVs. Production is not expected to begin before late 2027, and the company plans to invest 3 trillion won in FLiPP production (approximately $2.1 billion USD) to reach that milestone. The comparable technology from Japan Display Inc. — called eLEAP — has faced sustained commercialization difficulties since it was announced, and independent display industry analysts have noted that LG Display describes FLiPP as its own proprietary technology, even as reporting indicates a prior collaborative relationship with JDI.
Samsung’s Simpler Fix for a Stubborn Problem
Samsung Display’s Wide View announcement is technically narrower than FLiPP but closer to a product that foldable phone owners will experience. The company reported that the curved side sections flanking the central hinge on a current-generation foldable phone deliver only 40% of front brightness. This luminance drop-off is visible when viewing a folded phone at an angle, and it has been a persistent criticism of the foldable form factor since its commercial introduction.
Samsung Display’s solution was a complete redesign of the materials and structure of the organic light-emitting layer, enabling uniform image quality across curved sections without a luminance penalty. The company described the technology as applicable to next-generation form factors beyond current inward-folding designs — specifically slideable and rollable displays, both categories Samsung Display has shown as concept hardware at prior events. The 7.6-inch (19.3 cm) panel matches the display size of the current Galaxy Z Fold 8, though Samsung did not confirm whether or when Wide View technology will appear in a shipping product.
The Stretchable Panel and the AI Era Framework
Samsung Display also revealed what it described as the world’s largest stretchable display: a 20-inch (50.8 cm) panel built by tiling two stretchable panels seamlessly together as a seamless unit, with ultra-precise lamination minimizing the visible boundary between halves. The company identified automotive digital cockpits, humanoid robotics interfaces, and large-format digital signage as the primary targets. Additional concept displays shown at IMID included a 6.9-inch (17.5 cm) humanoid panel with embedded eye-tracking, an AI OLED Pendant (a wearable necklace-format panel), and a 31.5-inch (80 cm) QD-OLED gaming monitor rated at 4K resolution and 360 Hz refresh.
The intellectual framework for Samsung Display’s IMID presence came from its opening keynote. Seongchan Cho (조성찬), VP and Head of the Display Research Center, described three demands he argued AI-era devices are placing on displays: “Every Space” — displays that operate across all environments from wearables to automotive cockpits; “Ultra Low Power” — dramatically reduced energy consumption as AI workloads grow; and “Context Awareness” — displays that combine embedded sensors and on-device AI to adapt behavior to the user’s situation in real time. The company cited these as the AI-era display design framework for all of Samsung Display’s technical demonstrations at the conference.
Samsung Display presented 57 papers at IMID 2026, the most of any participating company and the second consecutive year it has led that count.
What the IMID Awards Signal
Both companies collected IMID Display of the Year Grand Prizes. Samsung Display’s award went to the OLED panel in the Galaxy S26 Ultra, recognized as the first smartphone with hardware privacy display. LG Display’s Grand Prize recognized its Hyper Double Scanning (HDS) technology, which doubles the data transmission speed in OLED TV panels and raises the native refresh rate from 144 Hz to 165 Hz — a technology the company confirmed is already in mass production across its entire OLED TV panel lineup.
The awards are not the news here. What they signal is that both companies are running parallel tracks: commercialized products winning awards for what they can do today, while the IMID research reveals demonstrate what the industry’s next chapter looks like. FLiPP and Wide View are not products yet. They are proof that the engineering problems the industry has accepted as fundamental constraints are, in fact, solvable.
IMID 2026 runs through Friday, August 21, with oral and poster sessions across all 16 technical tracks continuing through the conference’s close.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is a Fine Metal Mask, and why has eliminating it been so difficult?
A Fine Metal Mask is a precision-machined nickel alloy sheet with thousands of microscopic holes arranged in the pattern of a display’s RGB subpixels. During standard OLED manufacturing, organic materials are evaporated through these holes onto a glass substrate, depositing red, green, and blue pixels in their correct positions. The difficulty of eliminating it comes from the fact that the FMM-based approach has been refined and optimized for over two decades, and the alternatives face their own challenges — particularly the need to apply, align, and then selectively remove organic materials without damaging them, at extreme precision, across substrates the size of a small room. LG Display’s FLiPP uses UV photolithography to etch away unwanted material after coating all colors simultaneously, drawing on process knowledge developed for its WOLED TV manufacturing.
Could FLiPP eventually make OLED TV panels cheaper and better at the same time?
That is the implication that display industry observers are watching most closely. Today’s OLED TV panels use a “white OLED plus color filter” architecture (WOLED) rather than direct red-green-blue emission — specifically because FMM-based production cannot reliably pattern direct RGB subpixels at large panel sizes. Direct RGB OLED is the technology in smartphone displays, and it produces purer colors and higher efficiency than WOLED because no color filter absorbs any of the emitted light. If FLiPP scales successfully to volume production — targeted for late 2027 at earliest — it could enable the industry’s first commercially viable direct RGB OLED TV panels, potentially combining better picture quality with the efficiency advantages that a 55% higher aperture ratio makes available.
Why does the curved area of a foldable phone look dimmer than the rest of the screen?
Current foldable OLED panels are engineered primarily for flat-surface light extraction. When the panel bends around the hinge, the geometry of how light exits the organic layer changes, and the curved sections deliver only around 40% of the front-facing panel’s brightness. This is a structural limitation of the organic light-emitting layer’s material composition and orientation rather than a software or backlight problem. Samsung Display’s Wide View technology addresses this by completely redesigning the materials and structure of the emitting layer so that uniform brightness is maintained regardless of surface curvature — with the stated intention of extending the technology to slideable and rollable form factors as well as inward-folding phones.
Who else is developing maskless OLED production, and how does LG Display’s approach compare?
Japan Display Inc. (JDI) has been developing a similar maskless process called eLEAP, which uses photolithography for OLED subpixel patterning. JDI has faced persistent commercialization difficulties. China’s Visionox has announced plans to produce maskless OLED panels by 2027, while TCL CSOT is pursuing a different approach using inkjet printing. Samsung Display is exploring the concept. LG Display’s differentiating claim is that FLiPP is the first maskless process to pattern OLED pixels on a full Gen 8.5 mother glass substrate in a single run — rather than dividing the substrate before processing, as other maskless approaches do — delivering the 64% higher substrate utilization advantage the company highlighted at IMID.