LG Showing Rollable and Two-Sided OLED Displays At CES

January 4, 2016 by Dave Haynes

CES 2016_18 inch Rollable OLED

CES is not in my trade show plans this or most years. The show this week is way too big and busy for my tastes – and the great majority of what’s going to be shown and hyped there isn’t all that relevant to signage. There will be display tech and micro PCs, but there will also be acres and acres of smartwatches and fitness trackers and back-up phone chargers, and on and on.

I’ll miss seeing some cool new technologies, but I won’t miss the lineups for taxis, monorails, overpriced hotel rooms (even Circus Circus is sold out), the jammed sidewalks, and everything else that happens when 100,000-plus people invade a city.

Fortunately, CES is heavily covered by the formal and informal technology press – and there will be no end of reports from the trade show floors. Because I’ve attended as press in the past, I also get carpet-bombed, still, with press releases and interview invitations for the show. So I;m getting advance word on some of what will get shown, like the latest OLED technology from LG.

The ones that will generate lots of Ooohs and Aaaahs include what’s billed as the world’s first 30R 18-inch rollable display that can be rolled-up like a newspaper, a 55-inch design concept OLED TV display that is paper-thin since the electric circuits are installed separately, and a pair of 65-inch extreme-curve concave/convex OLED displays.

LG will also show a commercial 55-inch double-sided OLED display that shows different video images on each side for signage, and a  139-inch Vertical Tiling OLED (VTO) display that is made of eight double-sided 65-inch OLED panels that are connected together to form a S-shape pattern. The VTO display also shows different video images on each side.

Can’t wrap my head around the S-thing, and no pix provided, as yet.

LG will also show off an 86-inch stretched commercial LCD display with an aspect ratio of 58:9, billed as suitable for signage such as airport information, commercial, and retail displays. It also has a video wall product with four 55-inch LCD screens, with a 0.9mm bezel.

I’ve seen previews of paper thin and transparent OLEDs, and they are indeed beautiful. But they’re also crazy-expensive, with commercial use-cases that are going to be limited until prices drop as they did for plasma and LCD. It’s not immediately clear to me how I’d use a rollable OLED display, and my safe guess is that it is far too fragile to be rolled and unrolled repeatedly by the general public. One day, maybe …

 

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