At last year’s CES trade show, we drooled all over our favourite Christmas jumper when we caught a glimpse of LG’s OLED TV, with its slender proportions and insanely colourful pictures. Now LG’s got us all slobbery again, announcing that the 15-inch 15EL9500 OLED TV is heading to Austria in May, before it presumably ventures to Blighty and the rest of Europe.
LG says the 15EL9500 is only 3mm thick, with an HD Ready resolution of 1,366×768 pixels and a whopping contrast ratio of 10,000,000:1. It’ll reportedly consume around 33 per cent less energy than LCD sets of the same size, and have a USB port for playing back DivX, MP3 and JPEG files.
The only OLED TV to have made it to these shores so far, the 11-inch Sony Bravia XEL-1, costs a ludicrous £3,500 and offers a trifling 960×540-pixel resolution. But those moustachioed men in lederhosen will pay €1,999 (£1,810) for the 15EL9500, which is both much more reasonable and still far too expensive.
In October, an LG executive predicted that OLED TVs will be cheaper than LCD sets by 2016. The same chap also indicated his company plans to release OLED TVs of 20 inches and above this year. Here’s hoping he’s right on both fronts — we were disappointed when Sony indicated it had given its OLED the cold shoulder and we’re glad LG is still backing the tech.
We’ve dropped LG a line to get a definite UK release date for the 15EL9500, and we’ll update this story when we have an answer. In the meantime, here’s another pic. Cripes, that’s thin.
Update: LG has told us that the 15EL9500 will be available in the UK in April, but the UK price is still to be revealed.