Why an OLED curved-screen TV may be the best in the world
New screen technology is putting sharper, clearer and smoother TV viewing in the frame, and one company is leading the way
If you wanted a luxe television in 2013, it had to be LED. In 2014 it was curved screens, with Samsung flooding the market trying to convince us that we need a "gently contoured" set in our homes.
However, neither of these innovations are worth spending big money on. In 2015, that honour goes to OLED, a screen technology that, for now, is the reserve of a sole producer, LG.
The South Korean company's 55EC9300 OLED television is on sale in Hong Kong for just under HK$45,000. It has a 55-inch curved screen but what's so special about it? LED TVs have an always-on backlight that makes black areas of the picture look grey - especially if you watch with the lights off. However, OLED (which stands for organic light-emitting diode) boasts deep, inky blacks. It gives a much more convincing picture, but there's more.
Light is produced by passing electricity through a thin layer of carbon-based organic dyes, but because it's done at a pixel level (there are more than two million of them in the 55EC9300) and the OLED panel is made entirely of self-lighting pixels, it's a much faster technology than LED, which means smooth, fast-moving images free from blur and judder. The fluidity is quite something, and it's hard to go back to watching an LED television. OLED also happens to be incredibly energy-efficient.
OLED panels have a depth of 4mm, which designers love, but no other company aside from LG has been able to make OLED TVs successfully. That's largely because it's a very sensitive technology that has proven difficult for engineers to produce reliably in large sizes. The high price of the 55EC9300 isn't going to face much of a challenge for some time, although Chinese manufacturers Haier and Skyworth have begun to use LG's core technology in their own OLED TVs this year.
"OLED panel production is still very difficult," says Paul Gagnon at the Austin, Texas office of NPD DisplaySearch, which studies the global TV market. "Samsung has pulled back from large-format OLED, but LG continues to press forward and is the only brand to have ramped up commercial production," he says.