LG’s amazing curved, Ultra HD, OLED television absolutely blew me away when I looked at it in October of last year — I called it the perfect TV. It’s taken eight months to get stock, but we’re finally getting them in Australia. These TVs are the absolute creme de la creme, the state of the art, the best screens money can buy.
The best part? You can go and buy one right now, if you have the cash burning a hole in your pocket. Initial availability of the 55-inch 55EG960T and 65-inch 66EG960T is right now, in a total of 38 Harvey Norman stores across the country. Those guys have exclusivity on the TVs for the early launch period — just how long isn’t exactly crystal clear — and “the rollout will expand into more stores towards the end of the year”. You’ll pay a premium for what is a very premium television, of course — the 55-inch model is $5999, and the 65-incher is $9999.
LG is the only TV maker in Australia with a 4K OLED display, and these are the first ones you can buy. The company has been working on OLED tech for about six years now, and has sold a total of 6,000 55-inch 55EC930T screens since its launch — that screen will continue being sold alongside the two new panels, although it’ll be significantly cheaper at $3999 (and you can find them on a discount to around $3499 anyway).
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Ultra HD — 3840×2160 pixels, four times the detail of Full HD 1080p — and OLED — individually self-lit pixels, which can create any of a billion colours and can switch off entirely for perfectly dark blacks — combined in the one screen is the Holy Grail of televisions. You get a lot of detail and a lot of contrast with these TVs — I sat down for a half-hour viewing session of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and came away extremely impressed.
The EG960T series runs the WebOS 2.0 Smart TV operating system, and comes with a Nintendo Wiimote-esque Magic Remote, which you can use as a cursor to navigate around the screen by waving it around. Harman/Kardon high-end internal speakers are built in, although if you’re dropping $10,000 on a TV we’d probably suggest you just get a soundbar or proper home theatre setup anyway.
And yep, the two new EG960T TVs are curved, even though LG doesn’t explicitly mention it as a key feature — it’s not nearly as important as the fact that these screens are both Ultra HD and OLED in the same screen, exactly what we’ve wanted in a single TV for years. This isn’t a bad thing at all — although curved TVs are beautiful, the difference between them and flat screens is honestly miniscule when it comes to actually sitting down and enjoying a movie, and they look better when they’re turned off. They may be more quote-unquote immersive if you’re sitting in the absolute centre and close to the panel, too.
Head out to a Harvey Norman and see one of these in person. Trust me, it’s worth it. [LG]