LG has a bit of a penchant for eye-catching TV features over recent editions of CES – remember the rollable TV? Well at this show it’s going several times better with a transparent 4K OLED TV.
How does it work? You’re about to find out – at CES 2024 I got up close with the 77in LG Signature OLED T (as it will be known when it launches). This thing is actually going to launch in the US this month, and other regions early next year. So you could have a transparent OLED TV in your living room for the start of the new year. Although, of course, we still have no idea how much the no doubt rather high price point will be.
The Transparent OLED TV is also wireless for 4K pictures and audio between the screen and the Zero Connect Box, which is basically where all your cables connect into. There’s no unsightly cables with the unit at all. As you can see it resembles a piece of furniture, and the tech that drives the screen is housed in the shelf bit.
What I wasn’t expecting from this TV was the two modes – the transparent mode enables you to see a picture with a transparent background. The effect of this is quite clever and can be always-on for showing photos or artwork.
But obviously you wouldn’t want to be watching everyday TV in transparent mode. Instead, LG has solved this issue with what it calls a ‘contrast screen’ – you can raise this with the touch of a button. This works like a blind to ‘back’ the display so you can get the full benefit of an OLED TV picture.
And the picture is a particularly impressive one. Obviously I only got a fairly brief look at the TV, but it seemed to have the customary LG OLED image excellence. LG is using its new Alpha 11 AI image processor for this TV, which it says provides a 70 percent improvement in graphic performance and a 30 percent faster processing speed compared to its predecessor.
There is also a feature that LG is calling the T-Bar, essentially a ticker that runs across the bottom part of the screen for various updates including weather and news.
The future of TV?
Since you don’t need the Signature OLED T to be sat beside other equipment, you can place it in the middle of a room or even next to a window. LG suggests it could be used a divider between spaces. Of course, even though the picture can arrive at the TV wirelessly, you will need to plug it into a power outlet as you’d expect.
The idea, of course, is that you no longer have to have a big black oblong dominating your living space, with the intention being that the screen merges into your room. Various TV manufacturers have now experimented with modes that turn the TV into art or a more aesthetically pleasing item when you’re not watching TV, but this is different; a genuine attempt to make the screen merge with your wall. It certainly feels like a more effective solution than retracting the display, as with the older rollable TV.
And it’s a really rather interesting vision of where TVs could be taken in the future, merging into our homes in ways we simply can’t appreciate at the present time.
