Digital Lifestyle: Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TV

Is your flat-screen actually flat? Of course not, but a new breakthrough in display technology has produced a television that, while not quite wallpaper-thin, gets seriously close. Using organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology, this eco-friendly, 4mm panel also promises picture quality 1,000 times better than what we have now.

Bold claims, indeed, but for once the actual product matches the hype. Glimpsed at a recent trade fair, where both Samsung and LG were touting their upcoming 55-inch OLED televisions, it appeared almost too good to be true. During a sped-up sequence of a moving night sky, the contrast looked stunning, with the bright white, yellow and red stars against a textured, highly detailed, but completely black background.

Not a hint of the washed-out grey mush visible on most LCD televisions. And the good stuff doesn't stop there. The colours in some nature sequences appeared bolder and more real, and the objects moving around within the image do so fluidly, with no streaks blur or judder. Put simply, it feels more like you're looking through a window than simply watching telly.

Donning a pair of 3-D glasses is almost as big a revelation, with objects popping out of the screen with no double imaging (and the resulting headaches) or flicker.

"OLED televisions are a big step forward in many ways," says Ed Border, a television technology research associate for IHS, an information and analytics company in London. "As a new display technology, the introduction of OLED is more analogous to the introduction of flat panels in the mid-2000s. OLED offers thinner bezels, higher contrast, much wider viewing angles and, potentially, one day, flexible displays."

All this from a television that's barely there, its barely visible bezel contributing to its weighing less than one-third of a regular television of the same size. That's done by swapping the bulky backlight found in LCD televisions for self-illuminating organic compounds that need only an electric current to light up. In short, almost all of the components used by a regular television are irrelevant for OLED.

But there is one problem. OLED televisions, whose appearance in stores is imminent, will cost about HK$120,000 each. "At the moment, it is much more expensive to manufacture than LCD - so much more expensive, that initial sales will be confined to wealthy early adopters and industrial users who need excellent picture quality," says Ken Werner, founder of US-based Nutmeg Consultants. In fact, ABI Research predicts that OLED televisions will make up less than 1 per cent of flat TV sales for their first year, and will take until 2017 to reach just 9 per cent of homes.