Imagine the scene: You’re about to move house and you’ve got a gigantic 60-inch TV to carefully ferry across town to your new home, so you just roll it up like a poster and shove it into the back of your van. According to LG, this could be a reality by 2017.
LG’s display division yesterday announced two new types of panels, a rollable 18-inch OLED panel and an 18-inch transparent OLED panel. LG claims that the rollable display has a resolution of 1200 x 810, with almost 1 million mega-pixels. The panel can also be rolled up to a radius of 3cm without affecting the quality of the display.
Instead of using plastic to achieve this level of flexibility, LG said the panel is made out of a “high molecular substance-based polyime film”.
The transparent panel, as LG explained, has 30% transmittance, which is significantly higher than the 10% transmittance in existing transparent LCD panels. LG says that it achieved this by adopting the company’s transparent pixel design technology and incorporating it into the new display.
LG hopes that it will be able to combine the two new technologies and launch a TV that’s both rollable and transparent by 2017. Byung Kang, senior vice president of LG, said “ We are confident that by 2017 we will successfully develop an Ultra HD flexible and transparent OLED panel of more than 60 inches, which will have transmittance of more than 40% and a curvature radius of 100R”.
However, head of corporate PR, Jean Lee told me that more work needs to be done before the product can be commercialised: “We expect that it should take time to see the products in market because all related components should also be fully ready.”
LG has already shown-off some impressive flexible TV technology at CES earlier this year. It also joins Samsung and
At the Society for Information Display conference last month, Nokia demoed its high-resolution “book-type” and “three-fold” displays that can be folded within a 2mm radius, but also max-out at 100,000 folds.
