Everyone in the PC Gamer office loves great OLED displays for gaming, thanks to their super-fast response times, wonderfully rich colors, and excellent HDR performance. What we don't like so much, however, is the fact that none of them are very bright, and there's always the question of how long they'll last before they're ruined by burn-in. LG aims to solve both of these problems in one by using two OLED panels for notebook computers The new OLED display has been unveiled.

The technology has a simple name, tandem OLED, and you may have thought, "I've heard that somewhere before," and you're right, Apple has included this system in its recently updated iPad Pro series. It is not certain if these tablets use LG panels, as Apple is known to use Samsung as well as LG for display screens, but it will not be long before Samsung offers its own tandem screens.

Tandem OLED panels have actually been around for years and have been used for automotive displays for some time due to their durability, but it was only last month that such displays were announced for VR headsets, watches, and TVs. What is special about today's announcement is that these are designed specifically for laptops, with the first model being a 13" 2880 x 1800 touchscreen with 100% DCI-P3 color gamut and True Black 500 HDR VESA certification.

LG's press release makes a rather bold claim: "It can deliver twice the lifespan and three times the brightness of a traditional single-layer OLED display while consuming up to 40% less power...LG Display has made it about 40% thinner than existing OLED laptop screens and 28 % lighter than existing OLED notebook screens.

Tandem OLEDs are much brighter than conventional OLED screens because they use two layers of self-emitting organic LEDs. But if two layers are needed, you might ask, how on earth can they be thinner and lighter? I suspect that this is the case.

LG has probably found a way to make this very efficient (hence much higher brightness and lower power consumption), reducing the need to use particularly strong OLED layers (and thus possibly thinner and lighter).

Tandem OLED screens can further increase brightness by using two or more self-emitting layers, but then they face serious cost issues. It will be a while before two-layer OLED monitors become as inexpensive as high-quality IPS displays, since all modern OLED gaming monitors are very expensive and it is hard to imagine LG's new laptop tandem screens bucking this trend.

There is no doubt that tandem OLEDs will be really useful in desktop monitors rather than laptops. OLED panels on laptops are already pretty special, but on desktops they still lack full-screen brightness. However, since we are starting with 13", it will be some time before this technology is widespread on large desktop monitors.

Still, we have come a long way since the first OLED TVs were introduced in 2008, when an 11-inch 960 x 540 display could be purchased for $2,500. Today, you can still buy a 32-inch 4K gaming OLED monitor and still have over $1,000 left over.