LG’s large OLED panels get world’s first Intertek certification for “perfect” color and brightness — displays apparently look good under bright ambient light

LG Display (LGD) is the arm of LG that manufactures monitor and TV panels for its parent firm, as well as a great deal of other players including Apple, Dell, Sony, and Asus among many others. The company has just announced that its large-format OLED panels earned an Intertek certification for “perfect” color and brightness accuracy under ambient lighting up to 500 lux.

Large-format panels are those going into TVs, generally meaning size 48″ or larger. We’re taking LG Display at its word, as the press release states the certification means the TVs “accurately reproduce both color and brightness regardless of viewing conditions or content.” 500 lux of ambient is actually a pretty demanding viewing environment for a TV, as it’s roughly the equivalent to a well-lit office, conference room, or kitchen work surface.

LGD says the certification validates the OLED panels in question for “100% color accuracy” and “100% brightness accuracy,” remarking that Intertek used multiple test patterns, and that the panels maintained both accurate color and consistent brightness with all of them. The text also notes the panels are “color cross-talk free,” an impressive feat if true. Broadly speaking, OLED panels generally don’t bleed light into dark areas, but color contamination in adjacent areas is a real problem thanks to subpixel cross-talk. That’s actually a very tricky problem to solve (especially for tandem panels), and it’s an impressive feat if LGD truly managed to kill it altogether.

Intertek is a a pretty large UK-based technology and certification company (accredited with ISO/IEC 17025), but there aren’t details on the test processes it used. It’s worth noting there’s no standardized certification process for TV panels to begin with, unlike the monitor-specific DisplayHDR and its strict, OLED-specific True Black variant. LGD has worked with Intertek for many years, and the test results tend to include at least some actual figures.