- QD-OLED Penta Tandem is the name of Samsung’s next-generation OLED panel
- Already on the Samsung S95H television from 2026, and reaching the 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 achieved this.
The brightness increase is likely to generate most of the headlines, but there’s another very welcome development here: Samsung’s new panels should last almost twice as long, according to the company.
New technology means new brand, 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 that Samsung Display takes the same approach to light-emitting layers that Gillette takes for razor blades: it has increased the number of blue light-emitting layers from four to five. And that offers some important benefits.
How Samsung gave its QD-OLED a brightness boost
The blue-emitting layer is the light source of Samsung’s QD-OLED, and by increasing the layers from four to five and using “the latest organic materials,” Samsung Display has been able to offer greater brightness and energy efficiency.
Here’s Samsung Display’s explanation: “When you increase the number of layers of organic material, luminous efficiency improves, allowing for higher brightness at the same power level or maintaining the same brightness with lower power consumption. It’s similar to five people carrying a load that was previously carried by four, allowing for greater endurance or the ability to lift something heavier.”
It also appears that a newer, more advanced type of quantum dot may be used in the panel, which may also help brightness and efficiency, although Samsung didn’t address this in the presentation of the Penta Tandem technology.
What that means in practice is that the new five-layer structure offers 1.3 times the brightness and twice the product life compared to last year’s four-layer QD-OLEDs. That means a theoretical maximum brightness of up to 4,500 nits for TVs and 1,300 nits for monitors, although you shouldn’t expect real figures to match this, particularly for TVs.
30% brighter than last year’s Samsung S95F flagship OLED will actually mean a maximum brightness of around 2,750 nits, 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 variety of manufacturers, not just Samsung, and intends to expand its range of QD-OLED Penta Tandem panels across the full range of panel sizes during 2026, including a 49-inch QHD (5120 x 1440) dual monitor and several TVs.
This is a significant update and it will be interesting to see how it compares to last year’s panels – we picked 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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