OLED is so hot right now. They’re finally affordable and offer pure black at a high refresh rate that all you TV nerds drool over and rightly so. They’re effin’ good tellies. Now they’re stepping it up a notch demoing not one, but two new varieties of OLED that are sure to turn some heads at this year’s CES festivities.
Bendable OLEDs
The first, LG are calling the “Bendable Cinematic Sound OLED” or CSO for short. Why it’s not a BCSO I’ll never know, but what that translates to is a new 48″ curved display they’re aiming squarely at gamers.
The 120Hz panel does two things that are quite remarkable. Firstly it bends and not in a permanent way like the old (and terrible) curved TVs, this thing can bend into a 1000R curved display for gaming and then flat again to use as a TV.
On top of that the CSO is also a speaker without actually having a speaker in it. Instead it has this fancy thing called an “ultra slim film exciter”, which at just 0.6mm thick, vibrates to emit sound. LG claim it’s “highly impressive”, but that’s from a press release. Proof is in the pud mate, but I’m keen to see/hear.
Transparent OLEDs
The other jaw-dropper LG are showing off is their new transparent OLED panels. These too can include a CSO like sound “exciter” but instead of being bendy, bendy, they’re see-through.
There are a couple of examples the team have come up with as to where these might be a good idea. Restaurants are one of them apparently, as you can tell from the feature image of the article as well as windows in train carriages seen below.
Call me crazy, but despite being some amazing tech, I’m concerned for the birds here. All they need are giant transparent displays about that they keep flying into. Poor buggers.
None the less, LG will have a 55″ version of the transparent OLED on display and according to LG Senior VP, Jong-sun Park, “will grow into a next-generation display that can change the existing display paradigm.”
