LG has announced a new range of Direct View LED (DVLED) home theater screens, ranging in size from a huge 108-inch HD screen to an obscene 325-inch 8K panel that costs about 1.7 millions of dollars. CNET, and weighs more than 2,000 pounds. The company had already reserved these screens for commercial buyers, but will now sell them to anyone with deep enough pockets.
Viously, obviously, these screen sizes mean that home theater screens will not fit in many homes, a limitation that will probably have a lot to do with the display technology they use. Instead of using an LCD layer to create pixels and illuminate it with separate LEDs, these screens only use LEDs (others use smaller MicroLEDs, according to CNET), similar to what we saw in the Samsung LED The Wall and Crystal LED range. This has the advantage of creating better contrast levels, like what you would see on an OLED screen, because individual pixels can be turned off completely to create deeper black levels, without the risk of being recorded. But the challenge of this approach is to make the LEDs small enough to function as individual subpixels, which is why the first DVLED screens are so large.
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How CNET points out, it’s best to think of LG’s new DVLED screens as a replacement for a high-end projector that can already create an image 100 inches or larger. Viously, obviously, a DVLED is much more expensive, but you are left with a screen bright enough to use in a well-lit room, unlike the dungeons that most projectors prefer. The maximum brightness power of most of these LG screens is 1,200 nights, comparable to a normal high-end TV.
Most screens come with a normal 16: 9 aspect ratio, but LG also sells 32: 9 versions in case you want to watch two video channels side by side (or maybe watch one for While they die for Destiny 2 booty). In case you need more guarantees about how expensive this screen is, LG will send it to you in a full flight case, which even the company admits is “excessive”. All in all, it’s a package that is almost starting to make LG’s $ 100,000 roll-up OLED TV look reasonable in comparison.