On opening day of Display Week, crowds rushed in to see the
record number of component display suppliers at this year’s
event. One of the most notable booths just at the entrance was LG Display,
welcoming visitors not with one, but three curved OLED sets in full UHD
resolution glory in 77-, 65-, and 55-inch diagonal sizes.
The first question we had for the LG team, led by Hong Jae Shin,
Chief Research Engineer on OLED TVs, was why? Why is curved better than flat
displays?
Answers to this question have been all over the map since the
first big screen curved sets appeared. They’ve ranged from the
curved screen matches the curve of the eye (found in the Samsung booth today!)
to speculation that companies are doing it simply because they can.
But in that first morning analyst meeting with LG, Dr. Shin told
us the curved screen offers viewers the same distance from the edge of the
image to the eye as the distance from the center of the screen to the eye. “It’s
curved because that screen offers a better immersive experience,”
he told us. Adding to the point, that same distance helps make vivid
color (at any part of the screen), they told us.
Interestingly, LG said it used extensive customer research to
find that the optimal radius for the curved set is 5000 mm radius, or simply
5000R for its curved TV. By way of
contrast, Samsung said its curve is 4200 mm so one may speculate there may be a
new spec war of the curve on the horizon.
We found the Samsung curved LCD equally impressive, and perhaps
because it was LCD based, it was nice to see how this is breathing new life
(extending the runway) for LCD yet again.
-- Steve Sechrist
Any word on improvements in the 2nd generation LG OLED's versus the 1st generation that are on the market? Power consumption? Color gamut? etc?
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