LG’s 1mm ‘wallpaper’ OLED TV can be stuck on to your wall
LG Display's reveals its latest OLED concept TV, which can be peeled off your wall like a sheet of paper and measures just 0.97mm thick
LG Display has unveiled its latest “proof of concept” OLED TV in Korea – a 0.97mm thick “wallpaper” TV that weighs just 1.9kg and can be pressed on to your wall via a magnetic mat. To remove the TV, all you need to do is peel it off the mat like a sheet of paper.
That’s pretty impressive for a 55in set, especially when LG’s current flagship OLED TVs measure 4.3mm. However, this is mainly because the wallpaper TV doesn’t have any of the traditional circuitry you’d normally find in a TV, says The Verge, with the vast majority of it hidden somewhere off-screen.
Still, even if the wallpaper TV never makes its way to shop floors, it’s a clear indicator of where LG Display (LG’s dedicated OLED subsidiary that manufactures displays for the company) wants to take its OLED panels in the future. According to Korean news site Yonhap, LG Display said that it’s promised to ramp up its OLED production toward the end of this year so that it can meet customer demands.
“We should be able to supply a satisfactory volume to our clients from July or August, which means we’re hoping to buckle down production as well as promotion from the third quarter,” said head of LG Display’s OLED division Yeo Sang Deog. “It has taken a year and half for us to raise the yield to this level [for OLEDs], while it’d taken nearly 10 years to achieve the yield for LCDs,” he added.
OLED has often been heralded as the future of TV, as it effectively combines the very best bits of LCD and the now defunct plasma technologies. With OLED, its pixels generate their own light source rather than being illuminated by LEDs or fluorescent tubes, so pixels that need to display black can simply switch themselves off, leading to much deeper blacks than your average LCD set. Likewise, since OLED is emissive, it doesn’t need a bulky backlight integrated into the TV, allowing for super slim sets.
However, OLED can be tricky to manufacture, hence the current low yields and eye-wateringly high prices – LG’s 55EC930V, for instance, still cost a massive £2,499 when it first launched last year and that was classed as LG’s first “affordable” OLED.
Nevertheless, LG Display said it hoped to sell 600,000 OLED panels by the end of the year, and 1.5 million units by the end of 2016. It will mainly concentrate on large displays, with plans to introduce a huge 99in OLED panel later this year.