Whether you have picked your Christmas favourites from the Radio Times or you have got your DVDs at the ready, the super high def OLED TV is perfect for cold winter days and binge watching in snug comfort.
The new EC9300 LG OLED TV arrives with a super slim screen, a beautiful curve, looks great and makes your old HD TV look like a cathode ray of old.
Short of having the cast of Game of Thrones in your lounge room, OLED TV is as good as an evening of TV entertainment gets. Walter White looks meaner, the Orange are the New Black cast look sassier and The Downton Christmas special looks, uh, Downtonier. It’s the kind of TV we all hoped we would be watching in 2014, the new millennium otherwise known as “the future”.
By that we mean sharp, rich and clear with even dark scenes being visible. It won’t make Bane audible, but OLED, and in particular the new LG model, has the best possible picture quality, infinite contrast ratios, colors that appear richer, brighter and importantly, true black. A super high refresh rate also means The picture also seems clearer than ever before because of its absolute motion clarity – that’s brought to you by a refresh rate that a great deal faster than that of a typical LED TV.
There’s a reason for the curve too – it’s not just a nice look and it’s apparently not easy to achieve. If you’ve ever tried to watch tele peering around a corner or from the worst seat in the house you’ll know that LED screens can appear dark from certain angles. The idea of the curve is to get an optimal viewing experience from practically any angle.
Since showing the 55 inch largest OLED TV at CES in Las Vegas in 2012 – the world’s largest at the time – and releasing the first one onto the market in 2013, LG has been working to get a TV to you in your home at a size and price that suits the normal buyer, not just the tech editor. At the time, it was very much lusted after by fellow tech editors. It was frankly hard not to rip one off the wall of the display stand and saunter off to the hotel with one under my arm. Now in its second year in stores, the updates and amped up size (up to 77”) make it even more lusty.
Watching any kind of colourful moving image on these screens is mesmerizing. It certainly has wowed judges. The 77” LG 4K OLED TV won the EISA Best Product 2014-2015 Award.
OLED TVs are not cheap though, and they’re not yet available in small super affordable sizes, so why would you bother with the extra expense for an Organic Light Emitting Diode TVs? Well, things we like include the looks including a slimmer bezel in screen surround. In this case, about 4mm. Then there’s the Ultra HD 4K screen resolution of 3840x2160. In 2014 we now expect, and get four-colour Pixel WRGB technology, which adds a white sub-pixel to the usual red, green and blue mix, a “smart” TV (LG’s is powered by the webOS platform), the Ultra HD 4K resolution and convincing 3D if we can get it.
Other brands seem to have dropped by the wayside leaving LG and as the only real contender at the moment. And if OLED is meant to be the future of TV, which, when you first see one and then look at one again, and again, increasingly feels like it is, then other manufacturers have just got to catch up with LG’s output.