LG’s 65-inch UF9400 is a 4K TV with quantum-dot technology, a major buzzword at CES 2015. LG
At every year’s CES, Central Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center becomes the world’s greatest showroom for television sets. You take a 15-minute stroll through LVCC Central, and you’ll see all the TVs you won’t be able to afford in the new year: OLED sets, quantum-dot sets, sets that transform from curved to flat at the click of a remote, you name it.
At this year’s show, you’ll see all that stuff without leaving the LG booth. The company’s 2015 television lineup is a murderer’s row of eye candy. In 2015, LG will stay way ahead of the OLED curve with 11 new OLED panels in their lineup—all of them with 4K resolution. There’s also an OLED TV that transforms from curvy to flat at the touch of a button, a quantum-dot 4K set, and several TVs powered by 10-core processors. In these early days of 4K, those processing guts are key, as streaming services and built-in smart platforms are the only way to get UltraHD content onto your set.
The top-of-the-line model is the 77-inch EG9900, an UltraHD OLED TV with a flexible display that transforms from curved to flat (and vice versa) thanks to a remote-controlled motorized bezel. Along with the shape-shifting screen, the EG990 comes loaded with LG’s latest WebOS+ smart hub, a 10-core processor, Harman/Kardon-branded speakers, and an anti-reflective screen coating. It’s due out in the second half of 2015 for an unannounced price, and it will almost certainly cost as much as a car. Probably a luxury car.
At long last, there will finally be more flat OLED panels available too. Three new flat-screen 4K OLED sets will be available by the end of the year: The 65-inch EF9800 has the same specs as the flexible EG9900, but it’s a flat-screen (non-transforming) model at a smaller size. Two lower-end OLED flat screens, the 65- and 55-inch EF9500, have quad-core processors but are otherwise identical in specs. No prices or release dates for those sets, either.
Even though LG will be pushing 4K OLEDs hard in 2015, they’re also dabbling with the technology that many think will steal OLED’s thunder at this year’s show. Quantum-dot displays, which use a layer of light-tuning nanoparticles in between the LED backlight system and the color filters, are expected to help the next generation of LCD sets achieve OLED-like performance at a much cheaper price. While LG is still betting big on OLED—and to my eyes, OLED certainly still looks better—LG does have a 4K quantum-dot set in its 2015 lineup.
The lone quantum-dot panel in LG’s stable is the 65-inch UF9400 UltraHD TV, a 240Hz set with a quad-core processor and Harman/Kardon speakers. According to LG, the quantum-dot film in front of the LED backlight system translates to a “25 to 30 percent wider color gamut and 10 percent more brightness” than a traditional LCD panel. However, the company also says this first-generation quantum-dot TV may show oversaturated colors due to the nature of the technology.
To offer similar brightness and better color fidelity, LG says its range of new 240Hz “Color Prime” sets are a better fit. The the 79-, 65-, and 55-inch UF9500s have those 10-core processors, and LG says they’re also slimmer than the quantum-dot offerings. Again, no word on prices or availability.
There will be dozens more new offerings in LG’s TV lineup for the year—the vast majority of them being 4K sets—but whatever. This is not the time to talk about TVs you can actually afford. Once CES rolls around, anything other than a slim-bezeled 16K quantum-dot OLED flexible hologram panel seems boring.
In audio land, there’s another LG highlight: An app-controlled, multi-room wireless audio system called MusicFlow, which uses a dual-band mesh network similar to Sonos and supports 24-bit/192kHz audio. LG is positioning its new MusicFlow soundbars as an entry point for the system, as they’ll be priced significantly lower than Sonos’s $700 Playbar. The LG soundbars have prices starting at $400, and the general strategy is that anyone who picks one up for their TV room will eventually want to create a multi-room setup. Then they’ll theoretically buy more of LG’s MusicFlow speakers—provided they don’t already have a Sonos setup.
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