LG Official Announces 55" OLED for CES-

i'll be waiting for 2nd gen sets. possibly from Sony or Pioneer.

can't wait for it too as my C8000 is far from perfect.

so this will be an OLED backlight, presumably with a per-pixel backlight. should make for excellent contrast, but how would the LCD screen perform with color? Ive always preferred color on plasma vs LCD, and the promise of OLED was brilliant color AND contrast. if this has perfect contrast but mediocre color i may still have to wait.

An OLED backlit display is not a true OLED. It should have great local dimming.

55inch OLED -> PROTOTYPEs <-, there are a lot of prototypes we've never heard of again after CES, IFA etc...

I'll believe it's coming out when they're in stores for purchase.
Remember the wall of 31" screens they had last year, that were due for release "mid 2011" ?

And white OLEDs are not "OLED backlit" displays. Using white OLEDs with color filters mitigates most of the problems that OLED suffers from, at the expense of gamutwhich is a good thingthe further gamut gets from the BT.709 target, the more difficult it is for color management to fix it.

There is no LCD screen, the brightness is controlled by the the OLEDs. This is a true OLED screen not an OLED backlit LCD.

This conversation should probably be moved to the OLED TVs: Technology Advancements Thread. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=681125

More vaporware from LG and Samsung. Any sets that LG could actually produce when go to Apple for the insanely expensive AppleTV in early 2013.
By that time Sharp will be killing them with reasonably priced 70-90" 4K panels. Would people even consider a 55" display big enough for a "home theater" anymore? What people forget when they look to these new technologies is while they are waiting for them to mature and costs to drop, the current technology will make advances also. Despite the better picture does a $6,000 55" OLED stand a chance against a $1500 70" 4K Sharp LCD?

I was just reading about this new OLED hdtv here http://www.hdtv-news.com/lg/55-inch-oled/ , where they mentioned about the white OLEDs.

I'm a little confused. So it's not just an OLED backlit LCD panel? But is it a true "OLED" display if it doesn't have the r,g,b OLEDs?

Sounds like this could get even more confusing to people than LED HDTVs lol.

nice to hear but don't get too excited.

presenting a prototype for ces does not mean they are ready
for mass production for consumers. i think were still years away from
this.

I'm a little weary of this, too, since they went with the whole "world's largest" thing. Usually when they do that, it ends up being a prototype that you won't see for a couple years.

Looks like 2013 at the earliest now, unless Samsung does something big.

So they announced they are showing this off at CES. They absolutely did not announce any product. Nor will they at CES, in my opinion, although they will vaguely yammer about it being a product.

I know people get excited about this, but really this is an announcement about nothing.

I think 4K might be coming sooner than people think, but do you have any real sense or info on when they might arrive (other than Toshiba's presumed near 4K, 3D set)?

So this is an OLED that uses OLED as backlightning?!

If you want to got the projector route, you can get a Sony 4K projector right now. JVC has one with faux 4K using some kind of pixel shift processing or something. Sharp and a few others had 4K sets at the Berlin show. I would guess an early 2013 release. Sharp's large Quatron displays already have an extra yellow sub-pixel, so maybe they will adapt those production lines to offer the increased 4K screens. I think once volume ramps up it should not be a huge extra cost.

No, this is an OLED display that uses white OLEDs as the light source rather than RGB ones for subpixels. The light from each white subpixel shines through a red, green or blue colour filter to create colour.

This approach means that all subpixels age at the same rate, have the same pixel response time, and are less complex to manufacture. It's pure speculation on my part, but white OLED may also have better viewing angles if they don't need to use a microcavity structure. (I'm not sure if that's specific to RGB OLEDs or not)

Furthermore, even RGB OLED displays use color filters:


The downside to using white OLEDs with color filters is that they are potentially less efficient by creating a wide spectrum of color and then filtering out most of it for each color, rather than only creating the color each subpixel needs, and the display will have a smaller gamut as a result.

The display's gamut should still far exceed the BT.709 spec for HD content, so while it's technically a disadvantage, it could actually end up being advantageous for people that care about accuracy. The further a display's gamut is from the BT.709 spec, the more complex (and therefore expensive) its CMS processing has to be to produce good results.


A white OLED display has nothing in common with an LCD.

In theory, you could use a low resolution OLED panel as backlighting for an LCD display (e.g. 1000 dimming zones) but it is probably cost prohibitive to do so, and has all the disadvantages of LCD displays. I doubt that will materialise. (I certainly hope it doesn't) That's not what this display is though.




Whether this ends up being a display that is available to the public (I really doubt it) at this stage, I would not buy any new display that is not 4K native, doesn't support 48Hz, or supporting at least 1080p60 frame-packed 3D over HDMI.

Of course, even if the displays supported 1080p60 3D, there would still be the same problem we have today of 3D being a fraction of the panel's native resolution. (currently you need to drop the resolution to 720p for 60fps 3D) The "advantage" of this is that with a 4K native display, you would at least be able to display 1080p passively without any loss in vertical resolution. (though you would still have an interlaced image)

Unless you can afford to replace it within a couple of years of release, it's going to be outdated very quickly if it does not have support for those three (or four) things, as I would expect to see early support for some/all of those things from manufacturers this year, with it becoming more common next year.

I was very disappointed to find out that my current 3DTV will not sync to 48Hz, even though it has 50Hz support. I have had other displays in the past which had no 24p support, but would sync to 48Hz, as it was close enough to 50Hz to work.

"A white OLED display has nothing in common with an LCD."

It has something in common. The TFT backplanes are made almost exactly the same way.

Thanks Chronoptimist!

I wonder..if the white light have to shine through a series of filter, would this technology have similarities with LCD when it comes to viewing it from an angle?

And will OLED still have the capacity to "produce", if that is the right word, to produce absolute blacks?

Right, but that's nothing to do with image quality, which is what I meant.


It shouldn't have any effect on this really, though if it uses a microcavity structure, the image may dim somewhat when viewed off-axis. You won't see any of the severe color/gamma/contrast shifting that LCD has when viewed off-axis.

Plasma & CRT will still have better viewing angles, but it won't really be an issue with OLED displays as it is with LCD.


Yes, using white OLEDs has no impact on this whatsoever, though OLED displays do not necessarily have perfect black levels. Many of the mobile-sized screens do not, for example. Sony's HMZ-T1 OLED head-mounted display has 10,000:1 contrast at 200 nits, which puts it somewhere between the first and second generation Kuros.

Hopefully by the time we have OLED screens becoming mainstream, they will have perfect black levels though. I have heard that Sony's 25" broadcast monitor does.

Why is it that I still doubt sets will be available to buy next year. If I had a nickel for every time I heard it... I'd have a nickel

Bring it to me. I want

No. The LCD issue is that the light is located behind the LC layer, not just the color filters.

It should.


Because they won't be. Especially since LG isn't even announcing a production-ready set at CES.

What exactly would be absolute blacks vs what we see today? Take a local dimming Tv for example. The LEDs turn off. How can one get darker then off?

ANSI contrast ratio would also be infinite on OLED tvs that can deliver zero black. The best LED backlit tv can only manage 15,000:1 ANSI- which, in itself, is astounding.

The closest thing to this number(infinite ANSI contrast) is from one of those inferior Pioneer Kuro models.

Hm. I'm wondering what that will mean real world.

I believe it's because in an LED backlit display you have a much smaller number of discrete light sources each of which lights up a zone. Even with local dimming you are not turning off individual pixels but rather are dimming groups of pixels, or areas of the picture. This is not entirely precise.

With OLED the organic light emitting diodes compose the pixels, so now you have the ability to discretely shut off precise picture areas, so that you can have a very bright picture detail next to a completely dark one. It's more selective.

The LEDs only turn completely off with large areas of darkness, and the screen is only completely black when it's a full black image. (fade-to-black scene in a film for example) As soon as you have any zones that are not black, the whole screen lights up slightly.

While LED local dimming makes a huge difference to contrast on LCDs, you still have a fraction of the dimming zones as you have pixels. I think the most zones commercially available displays have today are around 300, and there are over 2 million pixels on a 1080p display. so you're always going to have some degree of blooming. (whether it's obvious or noteven with 96 zones it's surprisingly rare to notice it with film content)

That said, for a lot of people, local-dimming LED displays might be enough. I am very happy with my Sony HX900 which only has 96 local dimming zones, and a ~2,000:1 LCD panel on top of it. (maybe approaches 3,000:1 depending on calibration, I just measured it at my current settings, Sharp specs it at 5,000:1)

I have gone from hating flat panels, to being happy enough that I have replaced my CRTs and am no longer in a rush to buy an OLED display.

There are certainly potentially big improvements to come from OLED displays, such as a significant improvement to motion handling over other flat panels and "perfect" black levels on a per-pixel basis, but when I am watching a film, I am no longer bothered by the display. With other flat panels, I was always bothered by the poor black level, motion handling, image noise, flickering etc. and my display exhibits none of that.

I'll only be buying an OLED display once they're 4K native with support for 48Hz, passive 3D and have at least 1080p60 3D capabilities, if not 4K, and don't command a significant price premium.

I expect that there will always be a premium for them, but I won't pay anything more than a high-end display costs today. I had no problem paying the premium for Sony's flagship model last year, but I wouldn't pay anything beyond that. I expect the price of current flat panel technologies to drop, and OLED to replace the high-end models, rather than OLED to be a higher priced tier above them. (initially that will be the case, but I don't see it staying that way for too long, it's more likely to replace higher-end local dimming LED sets etc.)


Do you have a source for this? I'd be quite interested in seeing the data, and how it was measured. (I haven't actually measured my own display's ANSI contrast so I'd like to see how it compares)

Wait. So OLED means each pixel can turn on and off? So if I set has 2 million pixels and OLED display would technologically have 2 million zones? Am I getting this right?

Yes, though each pixel is the light source, it's not like LCD where you have local dimming zones behind an LCD panel, the zones *are* the display panel.

Technically there would be 6,220,800 zones, as the subpixels are controlled individually. (1920x1080x3)
Plasma also has subpixel-level control, but cannot turn the subpixels entirely off.



Local-dimming LCD has an LCD panel which has a contrast ratio of ~1000-3000:1 depending on the technology, and then a separate LED backlighting layer behind it.

Because there are only 100-300 zones for the local dimming, contrast is potentially approaching "infinite" (can do a completely black all-black screen, but not when there is anything else being displayed) but can drop as low as 1000-3000:1 in certain areas if there is a black and white part of the picture within the same zone.

If a Plasma has, say 5,000:1 contrast, then in certain cases it will outperform a local-dimming LCD, but the majority of the time it will not, and is not capable of displaying anything close to true black.

WOW. So that would mean crazy display. Amazing contrast on colors. No random light bleeding into another light source. This I got to see. If it is coming out. Expect me to purchase it. (Givin decent price range of 3k ish. But I imagine it will be a whole lot more then that. )