An update on Micro LED

While Micro LED could address some of OLED’s limitations, it doesn’t have the recognition of OLED in the consumer market. Any company releasing Micro LED consumer products will have to educate shoppers about the benefits of the display technology and why it’s better than OLED or even cheaper options. As such, much of the Micro LED industry is still focusing on “highly differentiating applications,” Virey said, like making specialized transparent displays for cars or advertising, very large commercial screens, and augmented reality (AR).

Ross Young, CEO at Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC), also isn’t expecting Micro LED in commercialized monitors or laptops in 2025 and pointed to other, more affordable options taking the spotlight.

“We will continue to see very small quantities [of Micro LED] in very large TVs,” he said. “However, with LCDs now appearing in 100 [-inch and larger] sizes with much lower prices, we don’t expect to see much growth in Micro LED TVs.”

For now, the best bet for Micro LED in 2025 consumer products is smartwatches, Virey told us.

Biggest obstacles

Naturally, one of the biggest obstacles facing Micro LED adoption is cost. You need a lot of Micro LEDs for each device, as each pixel in a Micro LED device uses one red LED, one blue LED, and one green LED per pixel. That’s a total of 24,883,200 Micro LEDs for a 4K TV (3,840×2,160×3).

There are also technical challenges with manufacturing the LEDs, including Micro LED transfer and assembly. “At a high level, the cost of this process doesn’t really scale with the number of LEDs but more with the display area. So it can be expressed in terms of $/cm²,” Virey explained. “A smartwatch is about 12 cm² … A 100[-inch] TV is 28,000 cm², so the assembly will cost roughly 2,333 times more than assembling a smartwatch. It’s more complicated than that, but at a high level, that’s the trend.”