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LG has taken the covers off its latest tellybox, which boasts phenomenal colours and superb contrast thanks to its OLED technology. It also offers a mind-bending 4mm thickness. It’s up for preorder in July, but the bad news is you’re going to have to lay down £8,000 if you want one. Eight. Thousand. Pounds.
OLED stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diodes — it basically means each pixel is able to generate its own light, rather than needing a backlight like a normal flatscreen TV. This results in blacks that are incredibly deep, as there’s no extra light making them look grey and washed-out. LG’s TV therefore manages to offer a superb amount of contrast while also being extremely vivid.
I went hands-on with the new telly over in Monaco and was somewhat taken aback by the intense boldness of the display. We’ve seen OLED screens before, but in much smaller devices such as phones and tablets, so it’s great to finally see the technology being put to use on a huge great 55-inch screen.
It’s not just the quality of the display though — at only 4mm thick, the TV is amazingly slender. By comparison, the iPhone 4S is 9mm thick, so to have a TV that’s less than half of that seems like some kind of insane dream of the far future. Couple that with its super-slim bezel and it gives the impression that you’re hanging a moving poster in your room.
The downside to all this, though, is it’s going to cost you. A lot. Head over to John Lewis in July and throw eight grand in the face of someone in the TV department to place your preorder. When you’ve done that, you can expect delivery sometime towards the end of the year.
While £8,000 is heart-stoppingly dear, new technology like OLED is always very expensive before companies start trying to out-price each other and develop cheaper ways of manufacturing. HD TVs were initially very pricey, but are now going for a song.
The high price of this model might mean it’s out of reach for the likes of me and you, but keep patient and you’ll find more affordable options coming along in the not too distant future.
In the meantime, check out our new hands-on preview and let me know in the comments below, or over on our Facebook page, whether you’d be happy to drop that sort of money on a new telly.
Editors’ note: Andrew saw the LG 55-inch OLED TV at an LG event in Monaco. His flight and accommodation were paid for by LG, but the company had no input into the content of this article.
