First only offered by LG Electronics, Samsung’s latest and greatest device is an OLED television. For those who may not know just what OLED is in comparison to an LED, LCD or a plasma screen, it stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode, and it features an amazing MultiView that permits a roomful of people to watch two different shows or movies on the same screen.
It’s quite simple: you sit down on the side of the screen your show is playing on, put on your 3-D glasses and be sure to plug in your headphones. Samsung Electronics America’s vice president, David Das, has said that people at the company have taken to calling it ‘the marriage saver’ because “my wife and I can be sitting on the couch watching two different programs on the same OLED TV.”
Wired gives us some juicy details: first off, OLED is brighter, thinner, and more energy-efficient than any other television picture on the market right now. Tim Moynihan goes crazy with adjectives to describe it: “Like plasma sets, OLEDs have deeper blacks, more pronounced contrast, smoother on-screen motion, and wider viewing angles — but even deeper, punchier, smoother, and wider.”
Here’s the pricetag: an OLED television will set you back $9000, or $7 per square inch of TV. Moynihan notes that number is four times the cost of a 55-inch diagonal Samsung screen, but the technology is so new that the release of an OLED television at less than $10,000 is considered an industry breakthrough. By comparison, an LG Electronics OLED screen is about $15,000.
USA Today reports Ken Park, a DisplaySearch analyst, as saying that less than 20,000 OLED screens will be shipped in 2013, but that number is expected to grow. And why not? Jim Willcox, a senior electronics editor for Consumer Reports, was quoted as saying that the image quality is higher than any comparable plasma TV, and “you get an unparalleled contrast range that makes images pop off the screen.”