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An image of a man and women sitting on the sofa watching LG OLED TV CX
Thanks to pioneering OLED technology, you can now experience movies as their directors intended and live sport like you’re in the stadium all from the comfort of your living room. Before you invest in your next TV purchase, find out everything you need to know about OLED technology below.
OLED TVs are fundamentally different to LED televisions. They use a unique screen technology that means they do not need a backlight, enabling slimmer designs and superior picture quality.
But what is OLED? Our guide will tell you everything you need to know.
OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode. This means it creates its own light source. This is different to regular LED TVs, which use a backlight to create a picture by illuminating pixels in front.
With OLED, there’s no backlight. Each individual pixel can light itself. The main benefit is improved contrast – the difference between the brightest and darkest your TV can go.
OLED achieves these stunning blacks by switching off pixels completely in dark areas of the screen. Individual pixels display the correct amount of light – without a backlight to bleed through. It makes colours feel more real.
OLED TVs also deliver a much wider viewing angle, perfect if you have people round to watch the big game.
OLED and 4K are not competing features – they are two different technologies that work together. 4K is a screen resolution, whereas OLED is a type of TV screen.
You can therefore have an LED TV that is 4K, or an OLED 4K TV.
But how do they work together? 4K increases the number of pixels on your screen, while OLED vastly improves the colour and contrast of those pixels.
4K technology packs more onto your screen, with four times the pixels of Full HD. When OLED and 4K combine, you can experience a brilliant picture.
Yes, OLED TVs are designed to be wall mounted. With no backlight, they are incredibly thin and lightweight, making them an ideal choice if want to fix your TV onto your wall.
The thinnest LG OLED TVs use what’s called an ultra-thin wallpaper design, that sits flush against your wall. The GX OLED includes an easy-to-install bracket to wall mount your TV. See how it works.
OLED is the latest and most innovative TV technology. It offers a serious upgrade in picture quality, clarity and colour. If you want the best in TV, choose OLED. We’ve highlighted in detail the key benefits of LG OLED TVs to help you decide whether it would be the right investment for you.
The ability to produce deep black colours is one of the most important elements in evaluating a TV’s picture quality. OLED TVs create the deepest black colours of all thanks to pixels that can individually switch off.
So you can have perfect black next to brilliant white with no light bleed from a backlight.
Why is this important?
Think about your favourite movies and games: the depths of space and night skies; shadowy cities and alleyways - all rendered in total darkness. In contrast, bright city lights and pristine pitch side markings brilliantly rendered.
When watching live sport or action movies, your TV can sometimes struggle to keep the pace. Motion blur can be a real problem – particularly for gamers.
Not so with OLED TVs.
The high refresh rate of OLED TVs means instantaneous updates on-screen, reducing the effects of motion blur and sharpening the action. Enjoy car chases and ice hockeymatches in perfect motion.
OLED TVs use self-lit pixels, which combine with NVIDIA G-SYNC support, to ensure smooth, fast images with no tearing. Input lag is also important, as it causes gamers’ reactions to appear more slowly on screen. LG OLED TVs boast auto low latency mode to combat input lag and minimise delay between command and action.
You’ll never fall behind your rivals when battling online either. Higher frame rates on OLED TVs display blazingly fast gameplay, in a higher resolution than ever before.
While you can also immerse yourself in the world you’re playing in, with HDR gaming graphics. Experience next gen graphics in incredible detail, thanks to self-lit pixels.
When you have friends around, you want them to get a good view of the game or movie. But with some traditional TVs, picture quality can diminish when viewed from an angle – for example, if someone is sat in the corner armchair.
But OLED TVs offer a wide viewing angle, without compromise.
OLED’s self-emitting pixels increase the field of vision and keep the same intensity, ensuring everyone has a front-row seat – even if it’s on the edge of an armchair.
TVs have been getting thinner since the days of the first flatscreen models. But OLED takes things a step further – with premium materials such as metal and glass and precision engineering
With no backlight, OLED TVs are dramatically slimmer than other models – some are as slim as a pencil and even as 4 stacked credit cards. The E9 LG OLED TV is bonded to a transparent glass panel – the screen feels as though it’s floating in mid-air.
Some OLED TVs, such as the GX, sit flush against your wall when mounted. They look almost as though they’re part of the wall – that’s some serious minimalist chic.
To appreciate the benefits of OLED TV, you don’t need to know this level of technical detail. But if you are interested, here’s the techy lowdown on how OLED works.
The picture is created on an OLED TV when an electric current is passed through the pixels that make up the screen.
If you were to look at a cross-section of an LED TV and an OLED TV side by side, you would see…
The OLED screen includes a layer that glows when an electric current is passed through it. Therefore, creating its own light source. As we’ve already explained, this means there’s no need for a backlight to create the TV picture – enabling the TV to be just millimetres thick.
If you are wondering whether an OLED TV is worth the investment, you’ll want to hear the opinions of TV and creative experts. We’ve collated some recent OLED reviews and the thoughts of Hollywood filmmakers, to help you make an informed choice.
Approved by Hollywood effects gurus like Rob Legato, OLED TV recreates your favourite movies, so you’ll feel like you’re right there in the scene – chasing the bad guys down a dark alley or floating through deep space.
The TV experts love it too.
Tim Miller, director of Deadpool, says “It's the Perfect Black. And the infinite contrast you get just makes everything pop off the screen. It's incredible.”
Harmonic is the official partner for the NASA TV UHD stream. They see OLED as “taking consumers much closer to the real experience of being in space”.
At LG, we make OLED TVs to suit different budgets and needs. All OLED TVs are premium, there’s no such thing as a budget OLED TV. But there are significant differences in prices, features and sizes across the LG OLED ranges.
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