LG Electronics has announced its recalling around 60,000 OLED TVs that were sold in its home nation South Korea, in order to replace defective power boards that could potentially cause overheating issues, it said.
Yonhap News first reported the problem, saying that 18 different OLED models built between February 2016 and September 2019 are affected, including LG’s popular B7 and C7 series TVs.
LG is reportedly investigating how widespread the issue may be, but Yonhap said that so far it only appears to affect TVs sold in South Korea.
A spokesperson for LG said that some of the components used in its power boards had shown performance drops, which led to an increase in current that could cause overheating. As a result, the company is recalling the affected TVs in the interests of customer safety, it said.
"The overheating issue occurred only in very few models out of the total that used the component, but we will provide free component swaps for all of them for customer safety," the company said in a statement.
LG said it has currently replaced the components in 22,000 of the affected TVs, free of charge.
ZDNet reported that the affected TVs include LG's 2016 OLED65E6, OLED65G6, and OLED77G6 range; its 2017 OLED65B7, OLED65C7, OLED65E7, OLED65G7, OLED65W7, OLED77G7, and OLED77W7 models; the OLED65G8, OLED65W8, OLED77C8, and OLED77W8 TVs from 2018; and the OLED65W9, OLED77B9, OLED77C9, and OLED77W9 models from 2019.
LG said the recall wasn’t government-mandated, but was instead acting on its own initiative to proactively prevent any problems.
The good news is that the issue is unlikely to affect LG TVs sold outside of Asia. While all of LG’s OLED TVs use the same panels that are manufactured in Paju, South Korea, the power boards and their components are specific to each region, as they’re designed to handle the different electricity standards used in each country. So TVs that are made for the South Korean market will usually have a different power board to those that are destined to be sold in the U.K. or North America, for example.
