LG claims its new 1-120 Hz auto-refresh rate LCD display for laptops extends battery life by 48% and helps the new Dell XPS hit 31 hours

LG has announced a new LCD panel technology for laptops it claims is dramatically more efficient than existing panels. Known as "Oxide 1 Hz", LG Display says it, "automatically switches the refresh rate down to 1 Hz when the screen is static and up to 120 Hz when needed."

The result is, "dramatically improved battery efficiency, including 48% more use on a single charge compared to existing solutions." That is slightly odd language which begs the question of what, exactly, the "48% more use on a single charge" claim actually means.

If it's 48% more uptime for the laptop as a whole, that's stellar. But it may be a more narrow measure of just the LCD panel itself. And there are, of course, numerous other power draws in a laptop, beyond the display, including the CPU, memory, storage, I/O and so on.

LG doesn't get terribly forensic with the details, so equally it's not known exactly how the efficiency savings are made. The basic idea is to reduce the refresh rate as low as 1 Hz, or a single frame per second, when static content is being shown. That means less image processing is required and less energy to update all the panel's pixels.

However, LCD panels operate courtesy of a rear-firing backlight which shines through the LCD matrix. Regardless of how many times you update the pixels per second, that backlight has to stay on to maintain an image.

Moreover, LG also hasn't explained how the technology is implemented. LG says, "the panel’s core feature is its ability to intelligently detect the usage environment," allowing it to "automatically" adjust the refresh rate on the fly.

LG says this is a "world's first" enabled by the development of the company's "own circuit algorithms and panel design technology, discovering new materials and applying the oxide with the lowest power leakage during low-refresh-rate mode to the display’s thin-film transistor (TFT)."

That could imply circuitry integrated into the panel with image analysis capabilities. But LG doesn't explicitly state that's the case. So, it could be that the image analysis or "circuit algorithms" are actually processed by third-party display controllers.

Either way, Dell's new-for-2026 XPS line of laptops will be the first to be offered with the new Oxide 1 Hz tech. Looking at Dell's website, the base configurations of both the XPS 14 and XPS 16 do indeed list "2K 1-120Hz" displays, while the upgrade panel is a 20-120 Hz OLED. Still variable refresh, then, but only down to 20 Hz, not 1 Hz.

Dell claims both the XPS 14 and 16 are good for up to 31 hours of battery life, which is obviously pretty epic. How much of that is down to the LG Oxide 1 Hz panel as opposed to, say, the Intel Panther Lake CPU, is an open question.

Speaking of OLED, LG Display says it is, "preparing to begin mass production of a 1 Hz OLED panel incorporating the same technology from 2027." So fans of OLED looking for the added efficiency won't have too long to wait.

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