CES 2012

LG EM9600 OLED TV

Scott Wilkinson  |  Jan 19, 2012

For me, the stars of CES 2012 were the 55-inch OLED TVs from LG (seen here) and Samsung, which both companies promise will be available as actual retail products later this year. Like the Samsung, the LG EM9600 is a mere 4 millimeters thick with the electronics in the base, but if you want to wall-mount it, some of that base will have to come along, increasing the effective depth. The picture quality is absolutely stunning, with truly infinite blacks and vibrant colors. Given that OLED is infamous for degrading over a relatively short time—especially blue—will those colors last? LG claims they will, and I certainly hope they're right.

COMMENTS
Mister Leadfoot's picture
Submitted by Mister Leadfoot on January 19, 2012 - 1:40pm

I heard LG is using RGB (and white?) filters in front of their OLEDs? Is that correct? I also heard that will allow each oled to age at the same rate and side steps the whole blue oled degrading sooner.

Scott Wilkinson's picture
Submitted by Scott Wilkinson on January 19, 2012 - 10:50pm
I heard that LG stacks the red, green, and blue OLED material on top of each other and adds white OLED material as well, then uses red, green, and blue sub-pixel filters much like an LCD TV. But I don't know for sure, so I haven't written about it yet. I don't see how this would allow each OLED color to age at the same rate or sidestep the blue-degradation problem, but I am concerned that the RGB filters might lower the amount of light coming off the screen. I intend to learn more about this and pass on what I learn ASAP.
techguy378's picture
Submitted by techguy378 on January 19, 2012 - 5:30pm

HTC's Nexus One phone uses an OLED screen and it doesn't have any problems with noticeable image degradation. On a two year old Nexus One phone that has its screen on 98% of the time, the picture will look just like it did when the phone was brand new.

Scott Wilkinson's picture
Submitted by Scott Wilkinson on January 19, 2012 - 10:52pm
Glad to know that the color on that phone hasn't degraded over time. Perhaps the larger the screen, the greater the problem, but I don't know.
techguy378's picture
Submitted by techguy378 on January 20, 2012 - 2:18am

Is the supposed image degradation problem really a bad thing though? Don't OLED screens have over saturated colors out of the box? I would think if the image lost some of its color this would fix the over saturation problem.

chrisheinonen's picture
Submitted by chrisheinonen on January 20, 2012 - 8:40am

The original Nexus screen (and any cell phone OLED screen that isn't a Samsung Super AMOLED Plus version) uses a Pentile screen array which has a makeup of 2 green subpixels for every red and blue subpixel. They are differently sized, but they are much different than your traditional RGB, or RGBW in this case, subpixel arrays on a display. Since we are more sensitive to green than red or blue this helps in our perception.

With the HD colorspace (Rec 709), Blue only makes up 7% of the white point, so if you had a 20% loss of light to this point, that would have dropped from 7% to 5.6%, which is much less noticeable than if you had a 20% loss in green, which accounts for 71% of that visible light. For this reason unless we are doing actual measurements of the screen with instruments, it can be really hard to tell if the blue subpixel has degraded much at all on a pentile OLED screen.

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