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Businesses Television Hardware Technology

'OLED TVs Will Finally Take Off in 2017' (engadget.com) 238

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
From a feature article on Engadget: After years of taunting consumers with incredible picture quality, but insanely high prices, OLED TVs are finally coming down to Earth. Prices are falling, there will be even more models to choose from and, at least based on what we've seen from CES this year, LCD TVs aren't getting many upgrades. If you've been holding out on a 4K TV upgrade, but haven't had the budget to consider OLED up until now, expect things to change this year. Even before CES began, it was clear the OLED market was beginning to change. Throughout 2016, LG steadily lowered the prices of its lineup -- its cheapest model, the B6, launched at $4,000, but eventually made its way down to $2,000 by October. Come Black Friday, LG also offered another $200 discount to sweeten the pot. A 55-inch 4K OLED for $1,800! It was such a compelling deal I ended up buying one myself. Since then, the B6's price has jumped back up to $2,500, but I wouldn't be surprised to see its price come back down again. So why the big discounts? LG reportedly increased the production of its large OLED panels by 70 percent last year, likely in anticipation of more demand. That could have led to a slight oversupply, which retailers wanted to clear out before this year's sets.
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'OLED TVs Will Finally Take Off in 2017' More

'OLED TVs Will Finally Take Off in 2017'

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  • Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Monday January 09, 2017 @03:09PM (#53636161)
    I mean this literally... other than TV salespeople, who cares? Every decade or two, when it's time to get a new TV, I go to the TV store, and I buy something that they have in stock, within my budget. I couldn't care if it was OLED, LED, or FairyDust powered. A TV is a TV is a TV.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by b0bby ( 201198 )

      I'm with you on this - my last TV I bought because my old tube number got fried. I bought the biggest tv Costco had in my price range. It won't be coming off the wall until it dies.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 )

      Investors seem to care a lot about this particular one. I am guessing someone or other owns a good patent. To most of us it's not a particularly compelling reason to throw out a working TV.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msauve ( 701917 )
      Yep. And, you can go out and find a slew of 55" ones for <$500. Pay 3-5 times that to get some gee-wiz marketing features? Some people have more money than they can spend, it appears. Whatever happed to those had-to-have-it 3D TVs from a few years back?

      • What happened? I have a 3D TV in my living room. 65". Works great and I love it. Does the feature matter to everyone? Of course not. I'm glad to have it.

        • Not trying to be judgmental, just curious as your opinion seems to be in the minority. What sort of 3D content do you regularly view on your TV that you feel is enhanced by being in 3D?

          • I occasionally enjoy some animated movies in 3D on my TV. Not sure if I would say they are 'enhanced', but I enjoy it. Lots of 3D movies still being made so there is certainly a market for them.

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)

      by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Monday January 09, 2017 @03:57PM (#53636539)
      Just because you do not know them does not mean there are no differences... http://gizmodo.com/why-is-oled... [gizmodo.com]
      Why's it so great?
      The LEDs in today's LED televisions are actually used only to provide a white back light, which then shines through a rapidly-refreshing LCD shutter array which tints the emanating light. OLEDs, on the other hand, operate as both light source and color array simultaneously. This may not sound like a big difference, but does offer a wide range of benefits including:
      Lower power consumption
      Better picture quality
      Better durability and lighter weight

      So the fact that cool previously expensive features are getting cheaper is news...

      • Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by by (1706743) ( 1706744 ) on Monday January 09, 2017 @04:40PM (#53636909)
        Not to mention obscene contrast ratios (which is implied by your post, I guess) -- some claim 1,000,000:1, others seem to claim infinite.

        I have an LCD (backlit) TV and a OLED phone -- in a dark room, displaying a black image on the TV will cause a noticeable amount of bleedthrough light. A black image on my OLED phone, on the other hand, can only be described by Nigel Tufnel [youtube.com].

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nmb3000 ( 741169 )

          Not to mention obscene contrast ratios (which is implied by your post, I guess) -- some claim 1,000,000:1, others seem to claim infinite.

          Contrast ratios get silly and mostly pointless when you have a black that is fully non-emissive. It's the same as dividing by zero -- hence the claim for an infinite ratio.

          With OLED panels, the important metrics will be brightness and color gamut.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AK Marc ( 707885 )

        Just because you do not know them does not mean there are no differences

        That the theoretical ideal of each has differences is unrelated to the retail experience. The thinnest LED TV is not far off the currently available OLED TVs. So should you pass up the thinnner, lighter LED TV because OLED is "thinner and lighter" despite being thicker and heaver than the LED TV next to it?

        LED is closer to its theoretical ideal than OLED because OLED has other constraints, like cost, which has held back development.

      • > Just because you do not know them does not mean there are no differences...

        The parent said nothing about whether s/he knows the differences.

        > Lower power consumption
        > Better picture quality
        > Better durability and lighter weight

        Virtually nobody cares about 1 and 3 - TVs are already cheap to operate, durable, and lightweight. And there's a very small market for the marginal improvement in picture quality. Today's cheap TVs already have amazingly good picture quality.

        • > Just because you do not know them does not mean there are no differences...

          The parent said nothing about whether s/he knows the differences.

          > Lower power consumption > Better picture quality > Better durability and lighter weight

          Virtually nobody cares about 1 and 3 - TVs are already cheap to operate, durable, and lightweight. And there's a very small market for the marginal improvement in picture quality. Today's cheap TVs already have amazingly good picture quality.

          A lot of people in warm climates care a LOT about power consumption. Because that power returns as heat, which then has to be removed by an already struggling air conditioner. I personally spent an extra day specing my home server to drop 30 watts.

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday January 09, 2017 @04:33PM (#53636857)

      A TV is a TV is a TV.

      What are you doing on a news for nerds site? A TV is a TV is a TV within the bounds of each technology. When a display technology comes through an revolutionises colour and contrast reproduction people care.

      I won't buy another TV till my current one dies, but I care to see progress rather than the world settling for the "it's just an idiot box" attitude. Interestingly you cared enough about it to post. Thanks for showing an interest in the story.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Anyone who cares about the quality of the TV image should care because the differences between OLED and LCD are significant when it comes to dark images. Unlike an LCD TV, an OLED TV has no backlight. The individual OLED pixels produce the light you see. The significance of this is that when a section of the image is black, it's truly black, as- in absence of light black. An LCD TV on the other hand uses a fluorescent or LED light source behind the liquid crystal display. When a section of the image is blac

    • >>A TV is a TV is a TV.

      It's clear that you don't know what OLED is. I just bought an LG OLED 65 inch two weeks ago and it's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. The colors are incredibly bright. The contrast ratio is infinity because black means that the pixel is actually turned off. If the whole screen goes black for a moment while watching a movie, it's like the TV is turned off. Watching space movies at night with all the lights off is a jaw dropping experience. I just watched Prometheus aga

  • OK (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday January 09, 2017 @03:09PM (#53636167)

    I will install it in my fusion energy powered level 5 autonomous flying car so I can watch a movie on my way to the Spaceport.

  • I'm not going to be replacing it for a few years.

    Let's hope the new features in 2020 are really enticing.

    • Re:But we got a TV in 2015 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Monday January 09, 2017 @03:58PM (#53636543)
      So, better picture quality, lighter weight and much less power consumption is not enticing? OK, perhaps not at $4000... But once it gets under a grand...

      • Not really. No.

        The picture quality has never been a concern.

        I don't know what the power consumption of my TV is. My bill didn't change a lot when we got it. I am concerned about the power consumption of my servers because they are on 24/7.

        Lighter weight is of transitory benefit when I'm installing the TV. We paid a guy to do it last time because I was out of town on business.

        PoE would be a nice feature. So one ethernet wired to a socket behind the TV could provide the data and the power and it wouldn't occu

    • This is an LG TV. Didn't we just get told all LG devices are "smart"? Ransomwear is already a thing on "smart" TVs. Why aren't the display and the driver separated out and connected by a dumb cord?

      • That's why my next TV, if I ever get one, it likely to be a monitor, unless the TV makers improve their game.

        • Unless you literally mean a computer monitor, a "TV" monitor (i.e. tv without any tuning) actually costs more than a regular TV...

          so just don't connect a regular TV to the network..

  • How is $1800 for a 55" 4k TV a good deal?

    • Re:It isn't a good deal (Score:5, Funny)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday January 09, 2017 @03:16PM (#53636215)

      It's a good deal because the customer will have to buy another one after 3 or 4 years due to burn in or the blue wearing out. It's a great deal for the vendor.

      (Continues to lament that we can't have both true black and a display technology that won't burn in or wear out quickly).

      • It's a good deal because the customer will have to buy another one after 3 or 4 years due to burn in or the blue wearing out. It's a great deal for the vendor.

        (Continues to lament that we can't have both true black and a display technology that won't burn in or wear out quickly).

        I had to check the date because that ceased to be an issue a couple of years ago. My LG OLED gets around 70-80hrs a week of use due to me working nights and the wife working days and its now almost 2 years old with no sign of burn in and the blue is still where it should be, maybe because I had my TV calibrated which resulted in blue being reduced by between 8% and 10% from 20 IRE to 100 IRE. It went from this [imgur.com] to this [imgur.com] after calibration.

      • (Continues to lament that we can't have both true black and a display technology that won't burn in or wear out quickly).

        Why do you lament on a pretty much solved problem which is primarily the reason why OLED's have taken 8 years to make it to the TV market?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AK Marc ( 707885 )
        Plasma has true black, and hasn't had burn-in problems for anything made in the past 10 years. All screens have burn-in. but it's only a "problem" for the technology you like least. CRT's burn-in problems are worse than plasma, yet the number of complaints don't match the extent of the problem.

        • So, you're saying that with the latest plasma TVs, you can *literally* watch black-pillarboxed 4:3 at full brightness without stretching for 10 hours/day for a decade without visible permanent burn-in?

          From what I recall, the plasma burn-in problem was "solved" by enforced stretching or slowly shifting the image back & forth to spread the damage (at reduced intensity) over a larger area.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msauve ( 701917 )
      Because it's 28% off the regular price, which is only 400% more than the competition. You're not spending $1800, you're saving $700!

  • I want QLED (Score:5, Informative)

    by HalAtWork ( 926717 ) on Monday January 09, 2017 @03:16PM (#53636221)

    QLED for me. [wikipedia.org] More power efficient, longer lasting color vibrance (won't yellow or fade), cheaper.

    • saw one in Costco this weekend. looks awesome. but i'll wait a few years until 4K content is everywhere. it's not like you have to run out and buy it to be ready for 4K content.

      once the content is here go buy the TV at half the price it's selling for right now

    • I want to see a QLED TV that lives up to the hype before I settle for that.

      Mediamarkt has Samsung QLEDs side by side with LG's OLED. The difference is night and day in favour of the LG with the current stock, and fading isn't an issue for many. My TV would die from consumer grade old age (4 years) before it fades with the use it gets.

    • Quantum dots have been in TV's since 2014 or so. Samsung's brand is SUHD, and AFAIK they've been on sale since then. I bought one of them in 2015 and the image quality is astounding compared to the previous HD set I retired with it.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 09, 2017 @03:22PM (#53636265)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      Yeah, people say the same about LCD over Plasma. Yet my 720p plasma has had multiple people ask me if I had 4k. Bright, crisp and clear, people assume it has to be better than the "old" and "bad" plasma and 720. And the OLED phones weren't rated more highly than the LED phones.

      I'd rather have 4k than OLED, unless the OLED comes with some more tangible benefits, like weight and power savings with that "better" screen. But for now, the cost penalty for OLED for a screen that's substantially similar to an

  • Burn in... Improvements? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by foxalopex ( 522681 ) on Monday January 09, 2017 @03:37PM (#53636395)

    LCD panels are already very cheap to produce and are virtually as thin as OLED panels. In fact OLED panels are so similar to LCDs that some manufacturers have come up with the stupid idea of curving them so that they're easier to market to consumers because we can barely tell the difference. (Completely distorts the image)

    My major concern with OLED is burn-in which apparently is possible in OLEDs, I haven't seen that in my Samsung phone but it's still a concern compared to LCDs. If I'm going to pay several grand for a TV it better be almost bulletproof. And 4K TV's are just silly, it's very hard to find 1080p content (most commercial TV is only 1080i at best) nevermind 4K.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Unless it's real 60fps video, in which case you're fucked. Deinterlacing film-source is child's play... you could probably do it in realtime using JAVASCRIPT. Deinterlacing real 1080i60 is another matter entirely.

        Faroudja *himself* declared about 10 years ago that realtime automatic low-latency deinterlacing of high-framerate content is hopeless. At best, you might get semi-ok results from offline non-realtime AI-assisted deinterlacing, but a $200 (or $2,000, or $20,000) TV will *never* be able to convincin

    • I haven't seen that in my Samsung phone but it's still a concern compared to LCDs.

      You probably haven't seen it because it was an issue that is all but resolved a few years ago. It was very VERY prevalent on Galaxy S, S2, and less so on the S3 models which all had OLED screens. The S4 I still have with sustained far more of a beating (daily use for google maps for 1-2 hours per day on top of normal smartphone usage) shows zero sign of burn-in. The burn in problem is one of the primary reasons it took OLED so long to make it to a TV.

      Also I wouldn't expect any consumer product to be bullet

    • it's very hard to find 1080p content

      So you clearly aren't at all serious about watching TV. Commercial TV? What is that? Whatever that strange thing is you can probably get it in 4k on Netflix.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lgw ( 121541 )

        All I get on Netflix streaming is "content will be be removed soon". Their streaming technology is OK (hate the client UI, but that's different), but that's only useful if I like one of the six programs they have left.

        I wish I saw a good (legal) alternative to DVDs in the mail, but I still don't.

  • The new 2017 LG OLED TV's have dropped 3D support.

  • A Nexus 6p, a 55" 1080p OLED LG, and the new Alienware 13" OLED gaming laptop. I did comparisons to the best LED laptops and monitors. The OLEDs cream them all, even for plain text. As for screen size vs color vs black level, I find black level and color far more important. I do most of my watching on the 13" laptop. The kids watch on the big OLED. My wife watches mostly on her LED laptop, but that's because she watches in bed, and there's no longer a TV in the bedroom. She also insists on watching w

  • I am not going to bother getting a TV until 2018 or so when ATSC 3.0 tuners are included. No way I want to spend money on a new 4K TV and then be stuck in a couple of years having to have some lame external ATSC tuner and/or sell it and get a newer TV just a few years later.

  • Plasma replacement (Score:3)

    by dhaen ( 892570 ) on Monday January 09, 2017 @03:49PM (#53636491)
    I've enjoyed a plasma TV for about 10 years and have been particularly unimpressed by the LCDs that superseded it. This year in Japan I saw the new generation of affordable OLEDs and realised that this is the technology that most likely will satisfy me. The colour is pretty close to correct (no I can't afford a Dolby monitor for home, though I have them at work). Without a reference white light (as used in my industry for accuracy), my eyes will adapt sufficiently to accept the small inaccuracies for home.

    BTW for those with the "more resolution is better" obsession, I suggest you consider the frame-rate issue, in terms of quality perception. There have been many studies that suggest that extra bandwidth is better utilised in increasing frame-rate than absolute resolution.

    • I've had a plasma for 8 years and haven't thought anything about it until I bought a decent LCD for the kids.

      I was shocked at the difference in the picture quality and clearly, if anybody thought LCD was good enough, they haven't seen what you can get with a plasma TV.

      I'm looking forward to replacing the plasma in the next year or two with an OLED, when the burn in/life issues are understood and not a problem.

  • like in 55' size and in the 5 thousand dollar range.
    i dont want a TV that big and i am not willing to spend more than a 2 or 3 hundred on a tv and i dont need a tv bigger than 24' to 36' max in size.
    i dont watch much TV anyway, i use a 24' LCD for a computer monitor, and get 6 stations over the air on an antenna.
    I would buy a OLED when they get in the size range and price range that i want
  • Finally I'll be able to watch TV again after my smartphone spoiled me.

  • will also finally be the year of Linux on the desktop.

    sigh...

  • I actively avoid OLED when purchasing anything with displays in them. IPS looks fine to me and is significantly more reliable.

  • OLED displays look gorgeous, and that will probably be what I get to upgrade from my LED DLP.

    Just one concern: How do I lobotomize the "Smart" that seems to be infecting all TVs these days? Stories concerning massive security and privacy issues with Smart TVs are all too easy to find, so you'd think it would be just as easy to find TVs that are "dumb", or at least articles on how to rip the "Smart" out of any given smart TV.

    I know Vizio has a (small) line of tuner-free displays, but then they foul it

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      Just do not connect your "smart"-TV to any network (wired or wireless). Only connect sources via HDMI or an unidirectional antenna/sattelite signal. This way, it's unable to phone home all the time, as "smart" TVs usually do, and won't tell the TV's manufacturer everything including the color of your underpants.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      Just don't put it on your wi-fi. Mine has an ethernet port, which I've used a couple times to get firmware updates, but now that it seems stable I won't even do that. None of the "smart" features are a problem without a network connection.

  • Now QLED is coming, manufacturers need to quickly cash out OLED R&D investments before the technology is obsoleted. This is why they will aggressively push it.

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