Panasonic 56in 4K OLED TV unveiled

If there’s one thing that Panasonic didn’t have in its original CES 2013 presentation, it was a 4K TV. That all changed suddenly and surprisingly, when the company announced a 56in 4K OLED TV.

We managed to get down to the show floor to take a look at the TV in action. As you’d expect from OLED, the quality of the TV picture is quite astounding. Each pixel is self-illuminating and can be completely turned off, giving incredible deep blacks and quoted contrast ratio of 3,000,000:1.

As you’d expect from OLED, Panasonic’s TV is very thin

OLED also means that the TV can be incredibly thin (just 4mm at the sides) while requiring a lot less power than a regular LCD or Plasma display. So far that’s all information that we know already and we’ve seen OLED technology at CES for the last couple of years.

What makes this TV different is the manufacturing process, which is collaboration between Panasonic and Sony. What’s been developed is an RGB printing process.

Using this process, OLED materials are applied to a substrate using a printing technique. It means that just the right amount of organic material can be applied, reducing wastage and lowering cost. In addition, the printing method can be applied to a variety of different screen sizes, so the same manufacturing process could technically create smaller TVs, too.

At the moment the 56in OLED TV remains a prototype, but it is the company’s intention to launch a product and it could well be out this year.