LG Signature OLED TV R: it's not just smartphones that should be foldable after all!
There's not much to say about the roll-up TV from South Korean manufacturer LG. Except perhaps the astonishment it provokes.
At the LG stand are five silver boxes. Behind each hides a TV displaying the same image: a shower of sparks. Placed on the top of the box, a trap door opens to reveal a scrolling screen.
Video producer Stephanie Tresch and I stand in awe.
LG has pulled off the feat of developing a 4K OLED screen that, when rolled up, measures 25 centimetres in diameter.
Simply impressive!
Television at home
It's easy to see why this is impressive. Television isn't a particularly aesthetic object, admittedly, especially when it's switched off. Installed in the living room or bedroom, this all-black rectangle looks out of place. But as you get used to it, you end up forgetting it's there. When the TV is on, we no longer perceive it as an object, so we only consider the content represented on the screen.
This is perhaps the thinking that prompted the South Korean consortium to use foldable screen technology to make a roll-up TV.
We've known since the Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin - the Berlin International Broadcasting Exhibition held last year - that LG has the capability to make foldable screens. At the show, the company installed floor-to-ceiling bendable screens. Just to clarify, foldable and rollable mean roughly the same thing. From a purely technological point of view, folding a screen is not quite the same thing as folding a sheet of paper, but it does mean rolling it up. There are no neat folds, so to speak.
But now we're looking at the screen of an LG Signature OLED R TV straight out of a trunk. There's not much to say about it, really, except possibly how much space this expensive device saves.
Almost invisible cables
In the advert for this TV, the cables are non-existent.
"You never see them in the ad. In TV ads in general, they seem to be powered by the ambient air," explains Luca Fontana, editor at Digitec Galaxus. As an expert in the field, he knows what he's talking about.
I take a closer look at the manufacturer's stand: where are the cables? Are they hanging down there at the back?
No, they're not.
No, because if you open your eyes wide, you see in the right foot a small opening no wider than 10 centimetres from which two cables come out, one for power, the other for HDMI? I've no idea. And at the stand, nobody knows either, the representatives are conspicuous by their absence, the guards, by their presence.
And that's understandable, mind you, because I wouldn't mind having one like that. Provided, of course, that the test Luca will hopefully do is conclusive.
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