Luxury TV brand Loewe surprised a few people this week when it announced that it will start manufacturing OLED panels on its very own production line at its factory in Kronach, in Germany.
Loewe, which sells higher-end and high-priced OLED TV models, such as the gold-plated Loewe bild s.77 gold edition and the Syno-stone encased Loewe Iconic TVs, revealed that it has created its very own OLED production line. It says it will begin panel manufacturing operations in May.
But if anyone is wondering how Loewe is able to manufacture its own OLED TV panels, considering the billions of dollars of investments made by LG Display to build up its own OLED production facilities, the answer is that it isn’t really going to make them at all. Rather, the company will simply put together the various components that go into the OLED panels by itself. It said it will buy the OLED glass from an unnamed South Korean OLED display company – which is undoubtedly LG Display – as well as the “open cell components” needed to create the finished product. That’s in contrast to other TV makers like Sony or Philips, for instance, who simply buy the full OLED panel assembly.
The advantage of doing it this way is not yet clear, but Loewe says that the process will give it more flexibility in terms of its ability to “adapt to market conditions” and “customer feedback”.
So Loewe’s OLED TVs will almost certainly be customized and enhanced in some way, though it remains to be seen how big of a picture quality improvement it can deliver. The company said it will be able to deliver the “best possible quality and performance” at each stage of production, and “guarantee absolute perfection down to the finest details”, with more “precise colour calibration of every TV”.
Loewe is a luxury brand and it undoubtedly has strong credentials and a small but enthusiastic customer following, so it may be capable of doing some interesting things in terms of enhancing picture quality. We can perhaps also hope that by doing things this way, Loewe might be able to reduce the sky-high prices of its products – but then again it could also increase its prices if the picture quality improvements are substantial enough.
