Over the past few years, TCL’s NXTPAPER displays have become synonymous with eye care, but the company’s next evolution of the technology is swapping out the existing LCD backpane for an OLED one, and that’s making a few people nervous. I talked to TCL about these concerns, and the company shared exclusive answers it hasn’t publicly disclosed regarding its upgraded tech, and I think they’re going to give some people a very real sigh of relief.
Android Central Labs
Android Central Labs is a weekly column devoted to deep dives, experiments, and a focused look into the tech you use. It covers phones, tablets, and everything in between.
I’ve been covering the negative effects of PWM dimming and temporal dithering for years, and now Samsung’s latest OLED trick is the latest wave of technology causing user discomfort and pain. It’s a systemic problem with a technology that’s designed entirely to push the boundaries of display “quality” while entirely ignoring user comfort, but one company is attempting to completely rework OLED into something far better than we have today: TCL.
Article continues below
The next evolution of NXTPAPER is switching from LCD to OLED this year, and while it’s bringing along some of the familiar tenets of OLED — wider color gamut, ultra brightness, and fast response times — TCL is attempting to do things differently and, as far as I can tell, better, all in the name of eye safety for you and me.
What’s wrong with OLED?
OLED has been one of the most impressive visual upgrades this side of HDTV and DVDs, but like any good thing, there are always tradeoffs. OLED is a self-emissive technology, which means each pixel emits its own light rather than relying on a backlight to pass through colored filters, as in LCDs. And while this means OLED has infinite contrast ratios and ultra-vibrant colors, it also means OLED will always flicker.
You can’t normally see the flicker happening because it occurs at a faster rate than your eyes might pick up, but our brains still notice it, and some people’s brains hate it. This flicker occurs because the pixel emits its own light, so whenever it has to change color, it turns off and then illuminates again with the new color. Every OLED manufacturer handles this flicker differently, but research shows that flickering at specific rates can help prevent discomfort.
Unfortunately, some of the world’s most popular smartphone companies — Samsung, most prominently — seem unwilling to change their methodology to align with the science. I wish I understood why, but it’s likely that their methods work for enough people, and the companies simply don’t want to spend money on new testing.
Thankfully, companies like TCL are paying attention and seem to actually care about our health in this regard. After all, it benefits a company to keep its users healthy so they can keep buying new products in the future. NXTPAPER OLED will use 3840Hz PWM dimming, a 10-15x increase over what Samsung, Google, and Apple use on their OLED phones.
Research shows that most people cannot perceive any flicker at all beyond 3000Hz, so 3840Hz should be comfortable for the vast majority of users. Current NXTPAPER technology uses an LCD backlight with a constant-driven current, meaning it’s truly a flicker-free light source, but a very fast PWM rate can be perceived similarly in most cases.
Reflections, blue light, and the boogeyman
One of the core tenets of NXTPAPER is its paper-like quality. It’s in the name, after all, and the key behind it is a unique chemical etching process that TCL says gives it nano-level roughness. This texture isn’t just for your fingers, though. It actually scatters light differently, softening the appearance of the pixels and giving them a more print-like appearance.
The matte texture is also engineered to resist fingerprints and smudges like no other display, too. I found this to be the case in every NXTPAPER device I’ve reviewed, and it’s only gotten better over the years. This, combined with the circular polarizer and an additional blue light filter layer, makes NXTPAPER easier to look at.
The big change with this new evolution of NXTPAPER is the use of OLED as the backend instead of LCD. That means we’ll keep many of the fan-favorite features of NXTPAPER and get the advantages of OLED contrast, brightness, and color gamut.
As you can see from the comparison images, OLED can make a massive difference in outdoor visibility when an anti-reflective layer is used. That, combined with the matte-textured surface and circularly polarized light, should make NXTPAPER OLED feel like the ultimate version of many people’s favorite display tech.
Image 1 of 4
Aside from outdoor visibility, NXTPAPER OLED should also address two color-related challenges in modern displays. First, the displays are 10-bit, which should help avoid temporal dithering to artificially enhance color gamut. Existing NXTPAPER displays use dithering in some situations, which can be as uncomfortable as PWM dimming for some users.
Second, it further reduces blue light output. Blue light has been the display boogeyman for a long time, and while all smartphones have some form of blue-light blocking, some companies implement it better than others. NXTPAPER has always had a hardware-level blue-light-blocking filter, but NXTPAPER OLED further reduces blue-light emission to 2.9% (down from 3.41% on NXTPAPER 4.0).
Unlike other companies’ blue light reduction techniques, TCL’s won’t make your screen all yellow and funky looking. Instead of just turning blue light off, TCL’s blue light filter shifts the blue output to the 457-462.5mm bands, which fit snuggly within the healthy blue light range. Standard OLEDs may emit blue light between the 400-455mm range, which is considered harmful.
So far, every major NXTPAPER upgrade has featured a new version number. TCL’s latest phones, like the NXTPAPER 70 Pro, feature a NXTPAPER 4.0 display, but TCL tells me it’s planning on stepping away from version numbers from here on out. The next NXTPAPER phones will just launch with a NXTPAPER OLED display, and TCL thinks this will make things clearer for everyone.
We don’t yet know which phone or tablet the NXTPAPER OLED will debut on, but we’ll likely see something by the year’s end. My best guess is that IFA Berlin in September will be where that phone debuts, and that’s a great time to unveil something as cutting-edge and groundbreaking as I surmise NXTPAPER OLED will be.
It’s hard to believe a $199 phone still exists in 2026, but TCL has done it yet again and made something that’s not only a great value, but also looks and feels like something twice the price, especially with NXTPAPER 4.0 display technology.
