LG
Transmit it Aston Martin Valhalla. Slide your finger to the left over that diamond inlay iPhone. Don’t bother with this modest two-bedroom home that is within walking distance of San Francisco with optimism. What is your next million dollars really worth? A TV.
And not just any TV, but a 325-inch, 8K-resolution direct-view LED. It has a similar concept Samsung’s The Wall and Sony’s Crystal LED: Massive displays of millions of LEDs. These types of extremely expensive TVs are fundamentally different from standard LED TVs, with (much) larger sizes, potentially better picture quality, and attractive price tags.
Like standard TVs, LG’s Home Cinema DVLED screen is available in different sizes (108 to 325 inches) and resolutions (HD at 8K). However, unlike most TVs, it is available in different resolutions with the same size. Keep reading why it is interesting and why DVLED is generally interesting beyond its large quantity and price.
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Small LEDs = huge TVs
We make a backup in a minute. All modern TVs light up in one way or another light emitting diodes. In most cases it is a series of hundreds or thousands of small LEDs arranged at the edges or behind an LCD screen. It is the LCD screen that really creates the image, the LEDs only create the light. Color filters or, increasingly, quantum dots are created the specific colors needed for a TV picture. OLED TVs are slightly different, with their organic LEDs (i.e. they include carbon) directly visible and create color in different way.
MicroLEDs, such as Samsung’s The Wall and Sony’s Crystal LED, are a form of direct-view LED TV. You are seeing the LEDs well (no LCD layer needed) and these LEDs are creating light, color and the whole image. This is much more difficult than it seems due to the large number of LEDs involved.
A standard 4K TV has 8,294,400 pixels (3,840×2,160). In fact, they need three times as many (24,883,200) because each pixel needs red, green, and blue subpixels to create TV colors. Traditional LCD TVs, also known as LED TVs, talk about marketing, they have so many pixels in their liquid crystal layers, but much less LEDs. Even mini-LED TVs, which have many more LEDs than traditional LED LCD TVs, have thousands and not millions of LEDs.
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This is because LEDs are not only relatively expensive, but also require much more electricity than any other part of the TV. Thus, 24 million of them would be a significantly larger energy pig than, say, a few hundred.
Making LEDs small and efficient enough has been a goal of all major TV brands, not to mention dozens of smaller competing companies you’ve never heard of. Their collective success is why we are already seeing it mini LED TV, with its stunning brightness and contrast, and wall-sized MicroLED TVs. Which brings us to LG’s DVLED.
LG
What is DVLED?
The direct display LED is a refreshing name that explains itself. You are watching the LEDs directly. But is it really MicroLED, like Samsung and Sony wall TVs? It depends.
LG told CNET that “all DVLED Extreme Home Cinema screens with the 0.9mm COB LED package type use MicroLED.”
This number, 0.9 mm, refers to the tone of pixels. This is the distance from the center of one pixel to the next, which includes the size of the pixel, but also the intermediate space. The smallest pixel tone of LG’s DVLED range is 0.9 mm, which is found in a variety of models from 81 to 325 inches and ranging from 2K to 8K resolution (they are the ones with MicroLED) . There are also models with a pitch of 1.2 mm and 1.5 mm pixels. The LEDs used in these versions are small, of course, but obviously not small enough to qualify as MicroLED.
Read more: MicroLED could replace OLED as the next television technology. This is how it works
The DVLED includes a variety of screen sizes and resolutions.
LG
Why these figures are important because of a counterintuitive feature of all LED direct vision technology: there is a lower direct display LED size limit. There is a limit as to the possibility of getting pixels currently, and this is true with LG’s DVLED as well as with Samsung and Sony technology. That’s why these TVs have a wall, at least for now.
The smaller LG DVLED Home Cinema screen has a diagonal of 108 inches. With a tone of 1.2mm pixels, this means HD or “2K” resolution as LG calls it. Interestingly, LG includes BTU specifications, as well heaters and air conditioning. Remember that LEDs generate heat and light, in a better proportion than, for example, incandescent bulbs. Therefore, in this case, they specify the 108 inches to produce 6,288 BTUs per hour. So yes, the worst case scenario is that you can use one as a space heater if you catch a cold while sleeping with your piles of money.
If 4K is more yours, the sizes range from 163 to 393 inches. You can also do dual 2K or dual 4K versions, which have a 32: 9 aspect ratio to watch two or more shows in parallel. I would absolutely use it to watch TV on one side of the screen and play a game on the other.
The 8K version, for $ 1.7 million, has a diagonal of 325 inches. It weighs exactly one Mazda Miata. It emits about 56,592 toasted BTUs, which I think is slightly less than one Falcon 9 at full throttle. I hope you have decent HVAC or at least several palm-clad athletic serfs.
Look, Timmy, your inheritance!
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And yet…
Joking aside, I would like to be clear about two things. One, it’s not really a “big TV.” I mean yes, but it’s really a substitute for the projector. It’s pretty easy, and economic, for a more than 100-inch image right now with a projector. What is not easy, basically impossible, is to get any projector that looks good in a bright room. LG claims that most DVLED sizes are distributed around 1,200 nights, which is similar to the brightness of a mid-range (much smaller) TV in today’s high-end, and often brighter than a typical projector.
Okay, yes, I would.
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Plus … this is the future. Not $ 1.7 million TVs (I hope), but live viewing displays. OLED is the beginning of that, but just like MicroLED and DVLED, so are it on the horizon quantum points of direct vision, QD / OLED hybrids and more. LCD screens will eventually disappear or at least be completely relegated to the bottom of the market.
Will there be a 65-inch 4K DVLED someday? Perhaps, but it is more likely that there is some variation in the technology that LG has been able to achieve due to what they have been able to find out by making DVLED screens today.
In addition to covering television and other viewing technologies, Geoff makes photographic tours of museums and fantastic sites around the world, including nuclear submarines, massive aircraft carriers, medieval castles, aircraft cemeteries, and more.
You can follow his exploits on Instagram and his travel video series on YouTube. He also wrote a best-selling science fiction novel about urban-sized submarines, along with a sequel.