Curved TVs are presumably one of the industry’s most ill-advised schemes. Unless you sat at an exact point in front of them, they resulted in a warped photo, intense reflections, and a generally unpleasant viewing experience for nearly no benefit.
Primarily, they were awful. It felt like curved TVs occurred because companies could complete them rather than they should.
It took me a short time to learn it, but LG’s new 42-inch OLED Flex, announced this week at IFA and hoped to bring to the market this fall, actually marks the return of curved TVs. It may have a monitor-style frame featuring some gamer-styled RGB lighting, and LG may have confused things barely by placing the OLED Flex on top of a desk like a monitor in its demo zone. But make no error; this is a TV-ass TV. It’s earned four HDMI 2.1 inputs, runs WebOS, and includes a built-in TV tuner. It’s a TV.
Well, it’s a TV with a pretty exciting trick — it transforms. At the press of a switch, a series of motors inside the device start to whir, hanging it from a traditional flat TV into a curved TV. The navigation button underneath the display can also prevent the bending procedure. At any rate, a curved TV looks much like a curved monitor. That’s how it can dodge the curved TV curse; it’s not always curved. Nevertheless, it’s an exciting approach that suggests you shouldn’t have to deal with the problems the curve begins when you’re not going to experience its benefits.
To show off exactly when you might desire a curved TV, LG had the racing game Forza Horizon 5 attached to the display and encouraged people to pose around three-to-four feet away to obtain the most out of the vision-enveloping advantages of a curved screen. At its maximum, the screen can turn an impressively curved 900R, but it can be altered on a percentage slider in a 5 percent rise for 20 additional curvatures. It was hard to speak amidst the noise of the IFA show floor, but the whirring sound was noticeable, and you probably wouldn’t desire to hear it mid-game.
Outside of its curving tool and chunky stand, the LG OLED Flex is the same as LG’s existing 42-inch C2 TV. It’s got the exact LG Display OLED Evo panel and supports both Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos (it can produce a virtualized 7.1.2 surround sound). In addition, it has a 4K resolution, a 16:9 aspect ratio, and a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. So in practice, it looks as good as LG’s widespread OLED range.
The LG OLED Flex is improbable to be cheap. Unfortunately, spokespeople for LG were unwilling to confirm how much the TV will cost when it goes on sale later this year. Still, given this thing contains a whole $1,399 LG C2, plus a series of, no doubt, very complicated mechanisms to make the automatic bending process creation, we’re looking at a device costing at least $2,000. So is it worth it for a 42-inch display?
One opinion could be that the OLED Flex is two products in one. It’s a traditional flat OLED TV and one curved gaming monitor component. But it is unsure how a hybrid screen like this would hold into most people’s homes. For example, is LG anticipating customers to keep it set up like a curved monitor on their desk, willing to be turned into a TV for watching movies? Or is the plan to have it put up like a standard TV on a cabinet, but with the possibility of pulling your chair up close and putting it into the curved mode for some immersive gaming action?
Between this and Corsair’s take on the bendable form factor — which still holds an LG Display OLED panel but a more comprehensive 21:9 aspect ratio and a transforming approach that asks you to flex it by hand — it senses like we’re entering a new era of curved displays. Curved TVs never actually worked out, but curved monitors have been verified pretty popular in the years since. LG’s OLED Flex emerges to be trying to bridge that gap.
LG Corporation, a South Korean global conglomerate, was founded by Koo In-hwoi and managed by subsequent generations of his family. It is the fourth-biggest chaebol in South Korea. Its base is in the LG Twin Towers building in Seoul. LG makes chemicals, electronics, and telecommunications products and operates subsidiaries like LG Display, LG Uplus, LG Electronics, Zenith, LG Innotek, LG Energy Solution, and LG Chem in around 80 nations.
LG Corporation as Lak Hui Chemical Industrial Corp. in 1947 by Koo In-hwoi. In 1952, Lak Hui became the first South Korean company to join the plastics industry. As the company grew its plastics business, it set up GoldStar Co. Ltd. in 1958. Both firms, Lucky and GoldStar, merged to form Lucky-Goldstar in 1983.
GoldStar produced South Korea’s first radio. In addition, many consumer electronics were sold under the brand name GoldStar, while some other household products were sold under Lucky. The Lucky brand was recognized for hygiene products like soaps and HiTi laundry detergents, but it was primarily associated with its Lucky and Perioe toothpaste. LG continues to fabricate some of these products for the South Korean market, like laundry detergent.
Koo In-hwoi led the corporation until he died in 1969 when his son Koo Cha-Kyung took over. He then gave his son, Koo Bon-moo, leadership in 1995. Koo Bon-moo renamed the company LG that year. The company also associates the alphabet LG with the company’s tagline “Life’s Good.” Since 2009, LG has held the domain name LG.com.