Garmin has made notable progress in a bunch of different areas of watch technology in recent years. There’s the new proliferation of satellite comms on its best Garmin watches , like the Garmin Fenix 9 Pro , along with some amazing stuff in dive-ready water resistance and titanium nano-molding cases . But the real tech trend of the last few years? OLED. The first Garmin OLED watch was the Garmin Venu from 2019. Venu has always been used as an experimentation ground, a way to test which smartwatch features should be brought over to the other core lines. It’s an often under-appreciated trailblazer. OLED adoption kicked into another gear in 2023 when the Garmin Forerunner 965 — perhaps the best all-round Garmin watch of that generation — introduced the tech to the Forerunner series. And that was just months after the arrival of the OLED Garmin Epix Gen 2 in late 2022. Since then there’s been no stopping OLED. MIP and Garmin were once ubiquitous
In 2026 it’s easy to forget just a few years ago, every major Garmin watch had a dull-but-practical MIP (memory-in-pixel) screen. Before OLED Forerunners, before generative AI, before a RAM crisis — 2022 was a simpler time in technology. Now OLED is ubiquitous, whenever a major new line is announced I go to see if Garmin has finally cut the ties entirely and left MIP in the past. Crucially, though, it didn’t happen with the Fenix 9, meaning transflective displays are here to stay for at least a few years. But what might make Garmin get rid of MIP? MIP vs OLED

(Image credit: Future) “There are definitely different things that are enabled for our customers if we stay with a transflective color MIP display. The most significant right now is battery life,” Garmin CEO Brad Trenkle told me. “Take an Enduro-type product, having a product like that which can work off an MIP display versus an OLED with its inherently higher power drain because it’s emitting versus being reflective [has benefits].” When you take an OLED watch outside, its screen brightness has to ramp up dramatically to compensate for ambient light. An MIP watch actually gets clearer, while doing nothing and barely using any power. An OLED Fenix 9 Pro, as you can see above, can reach up to 3000 nits, which is always going to use a decent amount of power regardless of how many efficiencies you get out of the underlying OLED panel tech. The power of Endurance

(Image credit: Garmin) For the kind of Garmin user who has their watch for regular runs and bike rides near their home in the city or suburbs, it’s no big deal. But for actual adventurer types on multi-day hikes? It’s not hard to see the continuing appeal of MIP, particularly when the ‘always-on’ display mode of OLED Garmin watches dramatically reduces battery life. Simply using your watch as an actual watch can be a surprisingly taxing endeavour, when outdoors on a sunny day. That argument may not hold forever, though. “We do see that gap closing,” says Trenkle…