LG Display showcased a new 97-inch TV featuring its most advanced OLED.EX display technology, but the bigger news is that it also incorporates a brand new audio technology that enables the screen to produce sound itself.
The display, which was revealed at K-Display 2022 in Seoul, South Korea, incorporates the company’s new Film CSO (Cinematic Sound OLED) technology, which allows the display to create sound without the need for dedicated speakers. With it, a 5.1-channel sound system is embedded directly into the screen, and LG Display said it creates a “cinematic level of immersion”.
A typical 5.1-channel sound system includes a centre speaker with four additional, directional speakers on the left and right, plus a subwoofer to add bass.
The tech is a big development because LG Display’s OLED screens end up being used in virtually every OLED TV that goes onto the market. They’re sold not only to LG Electronics, but also to other brands like Sony, Philips, Vizio, Hisense, Panasonic and more.
LG Display hasn’t revealed much about how the Film CSO technology works, nor has it explained how it would be arranged within the OLED.EX panel. However, the technology does sound quite similar to Sony’s Acoustic Surface Audio system, which is found on the Sony A80K OLED TV. So we can take a guess at how LG’s own system might work.
With Sony’s Acoustic Surface Audio Plus, the TV has four front-facing speakers, two actuators and tweeters at the back to add immersion. The actuators vibrate the OLED display gently to allow it to produce sound, ensuring that it is in sync with the picture being displayed. The system can also be enhanced with an amplifier, enabling the display to serve as the main speaker. We imagine LG has created a system that works similarly to Sony’s.
As for the OLED.EX display, this was first introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The company has already launched a 97-inch OLED G2 TV this year that features the new panel (See our review below). OLED.EX is said to be superior because it boosts brightness by up to 30%. It does this through the use of deuterium, a material that also enables greater energy efficiency and more accurate colours, the company claims.
At K-Display 2022, LG Display also drew attention to the personalised algorithm-based EX technology that helps to reduce image degradation in the TV.
"Personalized algorithms thoroughly study people's usage habits and viewing patterns from day one, predict the degradation of 33 million organic light-emitting diodes on each display, and maintain optimal brightness and performance at the initial state," the company explained. In other words, the TV learns about your regular viewing habits to compensate against deterioration accordingly.
The new display wasn’t the only thing on show at K-Display 2022. LG also took the opportunity to roll out a new kind of transparent OLED display, this time aimed at business meetings. The transparent OLED Conference Room solution is known as the E-Crystal and is really a kind of glass wall that can be used during serious business discussions to showcase charts and other graphics.
