LG is forever pushing the boundaries of zany display technology, and it’s not stopping with rollable TVs. This week, the company is showing off a 65-inch, 4K bendable OLED TV that looks truly delightful—until you consider what such innovation will eventually cost when it trickles down to consumers.
Curved TVs are nothing new, but this one has a special party trick: Users can adjust the curvature up to 1000CR, which might come in handy depending on the movie or game you’re watching. It seems like curved TVs aren’t as dead as we once thought—while they definitely aren’t as immersive if you’re not sitting dead center, having a TV that can be flat or curved caters to both the lone viewer and a family sitting down for movie night.
LG also showed off a foldable OLED tablet at the Society for Information Display (SID) Display Week 2020, which, to be honest, is the least impressive out of all the displays the company presented. Currently, LG’s tablet features two screens attached by a hinge, which makes it versatile in the sense that it can be used as a tablet or a laptop. But touchscreen keyboards generally aren’t as responsive as physical ones, as is evident by the variety of 2-in-1s on the market today. Most people will probably find they have to slow their typing speed down for touchscreen keyboards to keep up with their inputs.
But one neat thing about the foldable OLED tablet is the notification bar that wraps around the bottom bezel. It’s not clear if that will remain active even when the tablet is in sleep mode while the lid is closed, but it would be pretty neat to see your notifications through it.
But one of the coolest things LG debuted was a transparent OLED touchscreen display that looks lifted straight from a science fiction novel. In LG’s video, one of these displays is in a closet. It’s not clear if the closet door itself is the display, but in either case the display shows information over actual objects. You can interact with it the same way you’d interact with widgets on your phone—for instance, looking at real-time weather information while you’re deciding what shoes you’ll wear with the rest of your outfit. Sure, you can look at the weather report on your phone, but that’s not quite as statement-making as a transparent display in your closet, right?
Then there was a rollable OLED display, which LG also had on display at CES 2020. While that one was a roll-up model, this one is a roll-down model, so you can mount it to your ceiling and not have to worry about buying a stand or traditional wall mount for your TV. I’ve wanted a TV like this since I first watched Marty’s mom roll up that TV screen in Back to the Future Part 2 (which was more like a projector screen, I know), but, uh, if the roll-up one will cost $60,000 then I’d imagine the roll-down version will cost the same as well. Maybe one day.