LG has officially unveiled its new OLED TV lineups at this year’s CES 2025, with the M5, G5, C5, B5, and A5 all set to enjoy improvements over last year’s models. While there are plenty of advancements to ponder over, one of the biggest might be the removal of MLA technology – a feature of LG’s high-end G-series TV that offered boosted brightness.
This year, LG will be rolling out its new 4-stack OLED panels (an upgrade from the previous 3-stack displays), delivering up to “three times the brightness of conventional OLED options”. This is another huge play from LG to try and secure themselves at the top of the OLED market for yet another year – but will it pay off?
What is MLA technology?
Micro Lens Array aka MLA technology is where additional microscopic lenses are placed over an OLED panel, allowing it to reach significantly greater peak brightness without increasing the risk of burn-in due to better focusing the light emitted from the panel. This makes for a brighter screen overall and also improved contrast between the darkest points and lightest points on an image, giving a greater sense of depth. The second-gen LG G4 had probably the most impressive implementation of this technology, so at first glance, it might appear a bit strange they’ve decided to remove it, however, it makes sense when you dig a bit deeper.
What’s replacing MLA? Could it be Four-Stack OLED?
As Ross Young was quoted as saying during the Display 360 Summit in 2024, whilst MLA panel technology is impressive, it is also expensive to make (we’re talking about adding up to 5,000 lenses for each pixel on the TV after all), so LG have been coming up with an alternative for 2025 that promises to be even better.
“LGD has been continuously developing a 4-stack WOLED solution, which could potentially allow them to remove MLA due to the high cost of the MLA materials…It is expected in 2025 with a peak brightness of 3,700 nits.” (Tweaktown)
Although the company has not yet officially confirmed that Four-Stack OLED is the tech in the new G5 televisions, simply referring to it as ‘Brightness Booster Ultimate’, it seems very likely given the claimed uplift in performance.
How much brighter will the new LG G5 be?
LG has made some impressive performance uplift claims regarding the new G5 range as far as brightness goes, though these are limited to those TVs that come with the new ‘Brightness Booster Ultimate’ tech, specifically the 55, 65, 77, and 83-inch models. Although we can’t say for sure yet, buyers of the biggest 97-inch LG G5 are probably going to have a visual experience closer to that of the G4 from last year, and the same goes for the new size entry in the range: the 48-inch model (previously a size limited to the LG C and B series).
LG has claimed that in ‘full-screen brightness’ scenarios (where the screen is predominantly white) the G5 will be 40% brighter than the G4 was, which is very impressive indeed. The more relevant data with regards to images you’re more likely to see on screen however is the 10% window result, which reflects its ability to reproduce smaller-sized highlights on a darker image, improving the contrast and visual depth. For this LG hasn’t (annoyingly) given us a direct G5 vs G4 comparison, but has said that it should be around ‘three times brighter’ than a ‘conventional’ OLED television. WhatHiFi assumes that this refers to the LG B4 or something similar, and extrapolates out that this probably means around an additional 300 cd/m2, which is very nice.
