Every OLED phone screen you have ever used, from a Galaxy S26 Ultra to an iPhone 18 Pro, was made with the help of a very thin sheet of metal full of very small holes. It is called a fine metal mask, and it is one of the main reasons your phone screen is not brighter, longer lasting and cheaper than it already is.
Samsung Display wants to get rid of it. According to Korean trade outlet The Elec, the company has been quietly developing a 7-inch class OLED panel built without a fine metal mask, using an in-house process it calls Micro Patterned OLED, or MPO. The target is an engineering sample by the end of 2026, possibly slipping into the first quarter of 2027.
LG Display is chasing the same goal with its own technology, but it is aiming at laptops and monitors first. Samsung is aiming at the screen in your pocket and on your wrist.
The metal mask problem, in plain English
An OLED pixel is made of tiny red, green and blue spots of organic material that glow when current passes through them. To put those spots in the right place, manufacturers heat the organic material in a vacuum until it evaporates, and let it condense onto the glass through a stencil. That stencil is the fine metal mask: a sheet of metal tens of microns thick, with millions of openings, one set for each color.
It works, and it has worked for more than a decade. But a stencil has limits.
- Gaps between subpixels. The mask cannot place material perfectly, and it can sag or shift slightly with heat, so manufacturers leave safety margins around every subpixel. Those margins never light up.
- Wasted material. Much of the evaporated organic material lands on the mask instead of the glass. LG says only about 40% of the emissive material is used in its conventional process.
- A hard ceiling on resolution. The finer the holes, the harder the mask is to make, keep flat and keep clean.
- Size limits. Masks get harder to handle as panels get bigger, which is one reason big OLED TVs use a different white OLED approach entirely.
The share of each pixel that actually emits light is called the aperture ratio, and that is the number to watch. With a conventional mask it sits somewhere around 30%. Every FMM-free process is essentially a way to push that number much higher.
What Samsung’s MPO actually does differently
All three serious FMM-free approaches swap the stencil for photolithography, the same family of techniques used to pattern chips. They also all use tiny isolation structures to keep red, green and blue material apart. Where they differ is the order of operations, and that turns out to matter a lot.
LG’s FLiPP and Visionox’s ViP deposit organic material across broad areas of the substrate, protect the parts they want to keep, and then etch away everything else. Samsung’s MPO goes the other way around. It builds the microscopic isolation structures first and uses them to form organic material only where it is needed, so the organic layers are never etched. And unlike FLiPP and ViP, which leave their separating structures in the finished panel, MPO is reportedly designed to remove those structures once they have done their job.
| Samsung MPO | LG Display FLiPP | Visionox ViP | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Patterning method | Isolation structures first, material placed only where needed | Deposit broadly, then photolithography and etching | Deposit broadly, then photolithography and etching |
| Organic layers etched? | No | Yes | Yes |
| Isolation structures in final panel | Removed (reportedly) | Kept | Kept |
| First target | Phones and watches (7-inch class sample) | Monitors, then laptops | Smartwatches already shipping |
| Status | Engineering sample due late 2026 to Q1 2027 | Mass production targeted for late 2027 | Early mass production, yields still improving |
Why does the order matter? The Elec’s sources point to three advantages.
- Higher resolution with less damage. Etching right next to delicate organic layers gets harder as pixels shrink. MPO avoids that step entirely, which makes tight pixel spacing easier. That is exactly what a phone or watch screen held a few inches from your eyes needs.
- Less waste and fewer steps. FLiPP and ViP deposit material in areas they later strip away. MPO does not, and dropping the etch step should simplify the line and cut costs.
- Patents. Industry observers think the different process sequence and final structure could let Samsung steer around patents held by Visionox, LG Display and Applied Materials on their own FMM-free methods. In a field this crowded, that may be worth as much as any efficiency gain.
Emissive material used → 40% to 74%
Aperture ratio → 65%
Then pick one → 1.6x brightness, or 2.4x lifespan, or 13% less power
LG Display FLiPP figures for 23.5-inch panels, via The Elec
Why Samsung changed its mind
The most revealing detail in The Elec’s report is that MPO was effectively parked until early this year.
In September 2025, Samsung Display installed a 5.5-generation quarter-size vertical deposition system from AKT, an Applied Materials affiliate, at its A2 line in Asan to evaluate FMM-free manufacturing. The technology reportedly did not fit Samsung’s existing roadmaps for small, medium or large panels, and the commercial direction was unclear.
Then, in March 2026, Samsung got hold of a smartwatch panel made with Visionox’s ViP process and took it apart. The company had assumed ViP was well behind conventional masks on yield and performance. The analysis said otherwise: yields were still a struggle, but device characteristics were comparable to FMM panels, even in a first generation product. According to The Elec’s source, Samsung concluded that yield improvement is something it is good at, and restarted the MPO project the same month.
Put simply, a Chinese rival shipped the thing first, and that got the industry leader moving.
Samsung is not betting on one horse
A day before The Elec’s MPO report, ETNews said Samsung Display had settled on inkjet printing as its next generation RGB OLED process and was talking to partners about building a pilot line. Inkjet skips the mask in a completely different way: it prints the organic material straight into each subpixel. ETNews said that with stable yields it could cut manufacturing costs by more than 30% compared with mask evaporation, mostly because there are no expensive masks to replace and far less emitter material is wasted.
Read together, the two reports point to a company running both experiments at once. OLED-Info’s read is that Samsung has not yet picked its future mask-free process. The split also makes some sense by screen size: inkjet looks most attractive for IT panels like laptops and monitors, while MPO is being tuned for small, dense, high resolution screens. Phones and watches fall squarely in MPO’s lane.
What it would mean for your next phone
Here is the practical payoff. A bigger light emitting area gives phone makers a choice that is otherwise very expensive to buy.
| If a brand spends the gain on… | What you would notice |
|---|---|
| Brightness | Higher outdoor peaks without pushing the organic material harder. Easier to read in direct sun. |
| Lifespan | Each subpixel runs at lower current for the same brightness, so less burn-in and slower color drift over years of use. |
| Power | The display is usually the biggest battery drain on a phone. A double digit cut in screen power is meaningful battery life. |
| Resolution | Tighter pixel spacing without the mask’s limits, useful for watches, foldables and eventually headsets. |
Visionox claims its tandem ViP panels can deliver up to 4 times the brightness headroom or 6 times the operational lifetime of a conventional AMOLED. Those numbers combine two technologies and come from the company selling them, so treat them as a ceiling. LG’s more modest FLiPP results, roughly 1.6x brightness or 2.4x lifespan or 13% less power, are probably a better guide to what a first commercial generation looks like.
Battery is where this could matter most for phones. We keep seeing manufacturers chase endurance with ever bigger cells, and our look at how far foldable battery claims drift showed how much the display decides real world results. A screen that sips less power at the same brightness is the cheapest battery upgrade there is. Display tricks are also becoming a real point of difference between flagships, as Xiaomi showed when it built its privacy filter into the glass.
So when could MPO reach a Galaxy?
Nobody has said, and it is worth being honest about the distance between here and there. Samsung’s sample is due at the end of this year at best. After that come customer evaluation, yield work on a real production line and design-in for a specific phone, which usually locks its display a year or more before launch. The Elec’s own source said the point of the 7-inch sample is to find out how well MPO’s advantages hold up at an actual product size.
Yield is the real gate. As Sammy Fans put it, mask-free processes look great on paper, but if early production throws away 40 to 50% of panels, the cost savings disappear. Visionox, the company that shipped first, is still working on exactly that.
Our estimate: if the sample goes well, a smartwatch or a small volume device is the likeliest first home, and a mainstream Galaxy phone using MPO is more plausibly a 2028 story than a 2027 one. Samsung Display also supplies panels to plenty of brands beyond Samsung, so the first MPO phone might not even say Galaxy on the back.
FAQ
What is an FMM-free OLED?
It is an OLED panel made without a fine metal mask, the perforated metal stencil normally used to place red, green and blue organic material during evaporation. FMM-free methods use photolithography or printing instead, which lets more of each pixel emit light.
What is Samsung’s Micro Patterned OLED (MPO)?
MPO is Samsung Display’s in-house FMM-free process. It forms microscopic isolation structures first and uses them to deposit organic material only where it is needed, without etching the organic layers, and then reportedly removes the structures.
How is MPO different from LG’s FLiPP?
FLiPP deposits organic material broadly and then etches away the unwanted parts, keeping its isolation structures in the final panel. MPO avoids etching the organic layers and removes the structures. LG is targeting monitors and laptops first. Samsung is targeting phone and watch sized screens.
When will phones with MPO screens be available?
No date has been announced. Samsung’s 7-inch engineering sample is targeted for the end of 2026 or the first quarter of 2027. Commercial phones would come later, depending on yields and customer orders.
Will FMM-free OLED make phone screens brighter?
It can. A larger light emitting area means a panel can be brighter at the same power, or last longer and use less power at the same brightness. LG’s FLiPP panels showed 1.6x brightness, 2.4x lifespan or 13% lower power, depending on how the gain was used.
Sources: The Elec, “Samsung Display Developing 7-Inch OLED Prototype Without FMM”; TechRadar; OLED-Info; ETNews via OLED-Info; LG Display FLiPP seminar via The Elec and TechRadar; Visionox via Display Daily; Sammy Fans.
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